A. S. Byatt to Deliver Finzi-Contini Lecture

Novelist and critic A. S. Byatt will deliver the Finzi-Contini lecture at Yale University on Monday, April 5, at 4:30 p.m., in the auditorium of the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall St.

Her topic will be: “Old Tales and New Forms: Storytelling in Modern European Fiction.” This talk is free and open to the public.

Byatt is best known for her novel “Possession,” winner of the Booker Prize. Other works of fiction include: “The Shadow of the Sun,” “The Game,” “The Virgin in the Garden,” “Still Life,” “Angels and Insects,” “The Matisse Stories,” “Babel Tower” and “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.”

She has taught at University College, London, and published many essays, reviews and several books of criticism.

The Finzi-Contini lectureship was endowed in 1990 by the Honorable Guido Calabresi, Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and former dean of the Yale Law School, and Dr. Paul Calabresi of Brown University, in memory of their mother, Bianca Maria Finzi-Contini Calabresi.

A scholar of European literature and a native of Ferrara, Finzi-Contini fled fascism in Italy, along with her husband, Dr. Massimo Calabresi, and settled in New Haven. She earned a Ph.D. in French at Yale, with a dissertation on Ernest Renan. She was professor of French and Italian at Connecticut College, and for many years professor and chair of the Italian department at Albertus Magnus College. She died in 1982, at the age of 80.

The biennial lectureship sponsors a distinguished speaker in the field of comparative literature. The inaugural lecture in the series was delivered in 1991 by Umberto Eco. Subsequent lectures have been given by Rene Girard, Tzvetan Todorov and Charles Rosen.