Lukács and Baldwin: A Conversation Between Novel Theory and Black Studies

Reception 4:00 p.m.

Refreshments will be served

Lecture 4:30 p.m.

Duke English invites you to the inaugural Len Tennenhouse Lecture featuring author and professor Tim Bewes, Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities at Brown University. "Lukács and Baldwin: A Conversation Between Novel Theory and Black Studies," is the first of a three-essay study of race and the novel.

Professor Bewes is the author of Cynicism and Postmodernity (Verso 1997); Reification, or The Anxiety of Late Capitalism (Verso 2002); The Event of Postcolonial Shame (Princeton UP, 2011), and Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age (Columbia UP, 2022), the winner of the 2022 National Book Critics Circle award in the criticism category.

Bewes' recent work has been focused on thinking through the implications of understanding the novel not in formal terms but as a logic or a mode of thought, and to consider the way such an understanding may reverberate implications of understanding the novel not in formal terms but as a logic or a mode of thought, and to consider the way such an understanding may reverberate beyond our approach to literary criticism.

The Len Tennenhouse Lecture was established in 2023 in honor of the recently retired professor Leonard Tennenhouse. Tennenhouse joined the Duke English faculty in 2008 and during his tenure he served as department chair, interim DUS, and on numerous departmental and university committees. His areas of research included Shakespeare and American and British literature, which were often the focus of the courses he taught during his decade and a half at Duke.