Events

Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce has been called “the greatest literary biography of the twentieth century.” This talk, by the critic and biographer Zachary Leader, tells the story of the book and its maker, in the process arguing for the artistic claims not only of Ellmann himself, a remarkable man, but of literary biography in general.

Zachary Leader (born 1946) is an Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Roehampton. He was an undergraduate at Northwestern University, and did graduate work at Trinity College, Cambridge and Harvard University, where he was awarded a PhD in English in 1977. Although born and raised in the U.S. he has lived for over forty years in the U.K., and has dual British and American citizenship. His best-known works are The Letters of Kingsley Amis (2001), The Life of Kingsley Amis (2007), a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964 (2015), which was shortlisted for the Wingate Prize in the U.K. The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife 1965 to 2005 was published in 2018. He has written and edited a dozen books, including both volumes of the Saul Bellow biography, and is General Editor of The Oxford History of Life-Writing, a seven-volume series published by OUP. A recipient of Guggenheim, Whiting, Huntington, Leverhulme and British Academy Fellowships, he is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Introduction:  Gregory Moynahan, Associate Professor of History, Bard College
Q&A Moderator:  Elizabeth Frank, Joseph E. Harry Professor of Modern Languages and Literature, Bard College

Olin Humanities, Room 204  9:30 am – 5:30 pm EST/GMT-5
A one-day conference on The Critical Hannah Arendt Edition and The Life of the Mind.

The Critical Edition of Hannah Arendt’s Complete Works presents a vital new view of this eminent political thinker. For the first time, all of Hannah Arendt’s published and unpublished works are being made available in a philologically reliable scholarly edition with critical commentary. Two additional features make this edition distinct: Arendt wrote and published nearly all of her books and essays in English and in German; this fundamental multilingualism can now be fully taken into account by future Arendt scholarship. Further, the Critical Edition is designed as an innovative hybrid project, appearing both in print as books and in an open access web portal enabling new technologically supported textual analyses. Over two days of celebration, presentation, and discussion, the audience will be invited to learn about the new edition, to consider the place of editorial scholarship in academic and intellectual life, and to discover together this unknown Arendt.

The Life of the Mind was Hannah Arendt’s unfinished final work. In it, she focuses on three basic mental activities—thinking, willing, and judging—and their relation to the world of appearances and to the human capacity for moral and political action. The new critical edition makes available in print, for the first time, the text of the typescripts as Arendt left them, complemented by a wealth of previously unpublished material, detailed annotations, and extensive scholarly commentary. In this symposium, the editors will introduce this groundbreaking edition, offer three points of entry into the material, and invite the audience to join in a wide-ranging discussion about The Life of the Mind and its urgent contemporary import.

Open to the public.

Library, Finberg House  5:00 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Join the Bard College community for an evening celebrating our colleagues and the launch of the new Critical Hannah Arendt Edition and The Life of the Mind! We'll gather for an engaging discussion about the new editions, featuring welcoming remarks from Dean Deirdre d’Albertis, and a presentation by Thomas Wild and Anne Eusterschulte. Join us for stimulating conversation and refreshments. We look forward to celebrating this exciting achievement with you!