Franke Lectures to explore utopian literature

Author and alumnus Chang-rae Lee ’87, whose 2010 book “The Surrendered” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, will be among the speakers in the fall 2014 series of Franke Lectures in the Humanities.
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This fall's Franke Lectures in the Humanities will be delivered by (from left) Seo-Young Chu, Christopher Kendrick, and Chang-rae Lee ’87.

Author and alumnus Chang-rae Lee ’87, whose 2010 book “The Surrendered” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, will be among the speakers in the fall 2014 series of Franke Lectures in the Humanities.

“Utopia” is the title of this year’s series, which will be given over the course of the semester. The other speakers are Christopher Kendrick, professor of English at Loyola University Chicago, and Seo-Young Chu, assistant professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York.

Kendrick will deliver the opening lecture on the topic “Marx, Whitstanley, and Morris: Utopian Thinking and Practice in the Communist Manifesto, the Law of Freedom, and News from Nowhere” on Thursday, Oct. 30, at 5 p.m. in Rm. 208 of the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall St. It is free and open to the public.

Chu’s lecture, on “Utopias Misplaced: The Cost of Outsourcing Dystopian Poetics to North Korea,” will take place on Thursday, Nov. 20. Lee, who is a professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and the Shinhan Distinguished Visiting Professor at Yonsei University, will read from his latest novel, “On Such a Full Sea,” on Thursday, Dec. 4. Their lectures are also free and open to the public.

Kendrick has published two books, “Milton: A Study of Ideology and Form” and “Utopia, Carnival, and Commonwealth in Renaissance England,” and several essays, including “The Imperial Laboratory: Discovering Forms in ‘The New Atlantis’” and “Monster Realism and Uneven Development in China Mieville’s ‘The Scar.’”

Chu’s publications include “Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation,” as well as essays on post-ethnic science fiction, the place of mathematics in Emily Dickenson’s poetry, Asian-American science fiction, 19th-century mesmerism, North Korea’s anachronistic mystique, and Techno-Orientalist stereotypes. Her current book project is titled “Against Unification of the Koreas.”

Lee was born in Seoul, Korea, and came to the United States when he was three. He is also the author of the novels “Native Speaker,” “A Gesture Life,” and “Aloft.” In addition to being a Pulitzer finalist, “The Surrendered,” won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Lee’s other awards and citations include the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the American Book Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, the ALA Notable Book of the Year Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Literary Award, the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, and the NAIBA Book Award for Fiction. He has also written stories and articles for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, Conde Nast Traveler, Food & Wine, and many other publications. In 2000 The New Yorker named him one of the “20 Writers for the 21st Century.”

This semester’s Franke series has been organized in conjunction with a Yale College seminar, “Utopia,” taught by John Rogers, that examines utopian fiction. The lectures are made possible by the generosity of Richard and Barbara Franke, and are intended to present important topics in the humanities to a wide and general audience.

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