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Speakers and Writers in Residence
Academic Year 2008-09
The Gould Center will sponsor a series of talks and other discussions this year on
anti-semitism in the world today--its origins, representations, and repercussions.
"Israel and the Question of Global Anti-Semitism"
Thursday, September 18, 2008
6:45 p.m.
The Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum
Claremont McKenna College
385 E. 8th StreetClaremont, California
Born in Jerusalem to east-European Zionist immigrants, Amos Oz, Israel’s best-known novelist, spent more than thirty years living and working at the Hulda kibbutz in central Israel before moving to his present home in Arad, on the border of the Judean and Negev Deserts. Oz’s service in the Israeli defense forces involved him in border skirmishes with Syria, assignment with a tank unit during the Six-Day War, and action in Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur War. In 1961, following studies in philosophy and literature at Hebrew University, he began writing ceaselessly, first contributing articles to the kibbutz newsletter and the newspaper Davar, and eventually publishing nearly a book per year, beginning with his first collection of stories Where the Jackals Howl (1965) and his first novel, Elsewhere, Perhaps (1966). Besides the 20 or so books he has written in Hebrew, Oz has published extensively in English, his fiction and non-fiction—predominantly on politics and literature—having appeared in New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and numerous other publications.
Long identified for his advocacy of a two-state solution that would effect a secure division of Israel and Palestine, Oz has for more than 40 years—at least since the Six-Day War of 1967, when national exaltation over Israel’s victory virtually quashed any discussion of compromise on the West Bank and Gaza--withstood attacks from the press, government, and professional peers. As David Remnick explained, “Oz is rebuked because he continues to criticize both the Israeli and the Palestinian leaderships rather than seethe situation as a version of the French disaster in Algeria.”
For his literary output, which, besides his novels, includes more than 450 articles and essays, Oz has received several of the world most prestigious awards and citations, including the Israel Prize for Literature in 1998 (the 50th anniversary of Israel’s independence), the Goethe Prize in 2005, and the Heinrich Heine Prize in 2008. His works have been translated into more than 30 languages.
Amos Oz will speak at Claremont McKenna College’s Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum on Thursday, September 18, 2008. Oz’s presentation, which begins at 6:45 p.m., follows a reception at 5:30 and dinner at 6:00. |
David Grossman Thursday, November 6, 2008 6:45 p.m. The Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum
Claremont McKenna College 385 E. 8th Street Claremont, California “I am totally secular,” remarked David Grossman, one of Israel’s preeminent novelists, in a speech delivered at the Yitzhak Rabin memorial in 2006, “and yet in my eyes the establishment and the very existence of the State of Israel is a miracle of sorts … a political, national, human miracle.” Grossman then gave over the balance of his discourse to addressing the complexity of his homeland’s existential crises, and the hard choices Israel must make for its very survival. Voicing his personal grief, though without naming its cause—the death, a few months earlier, of his 20-year-old son Uri, who fell to a Hezbollah missile during a ground offensive in the village of Hirbat Kasif, Lebanon—Grossman continued: “The death of young people is a horrible, ghastly waste. But no less dreadful is the sense that for man years, the State of Israel has been squandering not only the lives of its sons, but also its miracle—that grand and rare opportunity that history bestowed upon it, the opportunity to establish here a state that is efficient, democratic, which abides by Jewish and universal values; a state that would be a national home and haven, but not only a haven, but a place that would offer a new meaning to Jewish existence; a state that holds as an integral and essential part of its Jewish ethos the observance of full equality and respect for its non-Jewish citizens.” The author of numerous novels, short stories, essays, plays, and non-fiction and children’s books, David Grossman has, since the publication of his first story, Donkeys, in 1979, garnered many awards and honors for masterfully wrought and singularly compelling prose. These include the Prime Minister’s Prize for Creative Work (1984); the Chavalier de l’Ordre des Artes et des Lettres (France); the Valumbrosa Prize, Premio Mondelo, and Vittorio de Sica Prize (Italy); the Marsh Award for Children’s Literature in Translation (United Kingdom), and the Har Zion Prize, Sapir Prize, and Emet Prize for Arts, Science and Culture (Israel; at the presentation of the latter in the Jerusalem Theatre in 2007, Grossman refused to shake hands with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert or Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch). From his early works, Grossman has acknowledged a love for Yiddish literature and the works of Franz Kafka and Heinrich Böll. His novels and non-fiction have dealt with all manner of themes: the Holocaust, Arab/Jewish relations, life on the West Bank (e.g., The Smile of the Lamb, 1983—later made into a film directed by Shimon Dotan; and his non-fiction The Yellow Wind, 1987)—even, as in his 2000 novel, Someone to Run With, Jerusalem’s vagrants, drug addicts, and runaways. David Grossman will speak at Claremont McKenna College’s Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum on Thursday, November 6, 2008. Grossman’s presentation, which begins at 6:45 p.m., follows a reception at 5:30 and dinner at 6:00. |
March, 2009 On October 12, 2000, from the upper floor of the Stockholm Stock Exchange Building, Professor Horace Engdahl, Permanent Secretary of the Svenska Akademien, issued the following announcement: “The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2000 goes to the Chinese writer Gao Xingjian, for an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama.” Gao is the first—and so far the only—Chinese writer to be so honored by the Swedish Academy. “Literature is born anew,” continued Engdahl in his report of the Literature Prize Committee’s selection, “from the struggle of the individual to survive the history of the masses. … His great novel Soul Mountain is one of those singular literary creations that seem impossible to compare with anything but themselves. It is based on impressions from journeys in remote districts in southern and southwestern China, where shamanistic customs still linger on, where ballads and tall stories about bandits are recounted as the truth and where it is possible to come across exponents of age-old Daoist wisdom. The book is a tapestry of narratives with several protagonists who reflect each other and may represent aspects of one and the same ego.” Dramatist, novelist, literary scholar, critic, linguist, translator, painter—and, perforce, peripatetic—Gao Xingjian brings to his unique creations a myriad of perspectives. Born in 1940 in Ganzhou in the southern province of Jiangxi, Gao studied French at the Beijing Foreign Studies University before becoming a translator at the Chinese International Bookstore. In the 1960s and 1970s, the period of the Cultural Revolution and the Down to the Countryside Movement, he was forced to work as a farm laborer in Anhui Province, and was sent to a re-education camp before being assigned to teach at Gangkou Middle School. After the death of Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976 precipitated the end of the Cultural Revolution, Gao visited Paris with a number of other Chinese writers, and began writing plays and film scripts for the Beijing People’s Art Theatre. Among the plays Gao wrote during these years, Signal Alarm (1982) and Bus Stop (1983), which were staged in Beijing during this period, gained Gao the reputation as an experimental—and dangerously subversive—writer. Primitive (1985) and The Other Shore (1986), openly critical of the government, were condemned by Communist Party officials and banned from public performance. Like Signal Alarm and Bus Stop (“the most pernicious work since the establishment of the People’s Republic,” complained a state censor), Primitive and The Other Shore commingle the influences of such Western modernist writers as Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett, and Tadeusz Kantor with elements of Chinese ancient masked drama—unpardonable “spiritual pollution,” according to Gao’s official censors. Lest, however, we misconstrue Gao’s purpose, we would do well to heed these remarks, made by the writer in Stockholm at the end of 2000: “To subvert is not the aim of literature; its value lies in discovering and revealing what is rarely known, little known, thought to be known but in fact not very well known of the truth of the human world. … [T]ruth is the unassailable and most basic quality of literature.” Gao Xingjiang will visit Claremont McKenna College in March to discuss his work. |
Mort Sahl Gould Center Distinguished Visitor in the Humanities for Academic Year 2008-09  Montreal-born, Los Angeles-raised Mort Sahl has been clasting icons—from nightclub stages and typewriters, on big and small screens, and as a speechwriter for President John F. Kennedy—for more than 50 years. The rapid-fire salvos he launched at the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950's earned him the sobriquet "Rebel Without a Pause," and his unbridled criticism of the Warren Report drew the wrath of a censorious press and punitive entertainment industry. One of the first post-World War II comedians to bring politics into the theater, he has profoundly influenced humorists and social satirists from Lenny Bruce, the Smothers Brothers, and George Carlin, to Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Dennis Miller, and Lewis Black.
During Academic Year 2008-09, Mr. Sahl will teach courses on politics, critical thinking, and screenwriting. Reviews and commentary by Paul Krassner:
http://www.counterpunch.org/krassner08252007.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-krassner/sahls-last-punchline_b_51363.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-krassner/review-of-mort-sahl-tribu_b_55247.html Article by James Wolcott in the August 2007 issue of Vanity Fair magazine:
http://www.vanityfair.com/fame/features/2007/08/wolcott200708?currentPage=1 A web page documenting a Public Broadcasting Service program about Mort Sahl:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/sahl_m.html |
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