TORCH (Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities) and Princeton University Press are delighted to invite guests to attend the 2022 Princeton University Press Lecture Series in European Culture and History.
This year’s lectures are given by Professor William Marx, Professor of Comparative Literature at the Collège de France, on the subject of ‘Libraries of the Mind’.
“Minds are libraries. Whether we like it or not, we never read texts in a vacuum, without context from other works. Instead, we draw texts from mental shelves, which contextualize, sort, and steer our understanding of them. These mental shelves are called canon, heritage, patrimony, or tradition. But these invisible shelves are themselves inseparable from the material and visible libraries which exist in our real world, and with which they share an intertwined history.
The three lectures in the 2022 Princeton University Press Lecture Series in European Culture and History aim to explore this concept of ‘libraries of the mind’ and to explore the effect on our knowledge and enjoyment of literature.”
This is the first lecture in the series, entitled ‘Libraries of the Mind’.
Professor Marx is a writer, researcher, and Professor of Comparative Literature at the Collège de France. He received the Montyon Prize of the Académie française in 2010 and was elected a member of the Academia Europaea in 2022. He is the author of The Hatred of Literature (2018) and The Tomb of Oedipus: Why Greek Tragedies Were not Tragic (2022).
This event is free but registration is required.