Event Description
What boundaries should we consider when we read a work of literature? How can thinking about the boundaries of literature – such as the cover, the title, the chapter heading, the author’s name, or the footnotes – help us think about the boundaries of language, nation, empathy, and community?
To answer these questions, we’ll read together Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story, “The Boundary,” which was published in The New Yorker in 2018. Lahiri is both the author and the translator of the work, which she wrote originally in Italian and subsequently rendered into English for the U.S. publication. “The Boundary” tells a story about observers and storytellers, including a writer who, with her family, has traveled to the countryside for vacation and a young caretaker who serves them. The visiting family are at ease and also strangers; the caretakers are at home and also foreigners. Existing at the crossroads between Italian and English, original and translation, “The Boundary” is a story about exclusion, violence, and ultimately about language. When we gather together, we’ll consider who narrates and who speaks.
Please come prepared to share one “boundary” you’ve noticed in the story. Dessert and tea will be served. RSVP here.
Speaker and Author Bios
Rebecca L. Walkowitz is Provost and Dean of the Faculty, as well as Claire Tow Professor of English, at Barnard College of Columbia University. An expert on 20th- and 21st-century literature, she has authored or edited 10 books, produced hundreds of essays and articles, and delivered more than 80 keynote and distinguished lectures in the fields of modernism, contemporary fiction, and world literature in Asia, Europe, Australia, and North America. Her research and teaching, which spans more than two decades, explores how writers and other artists create novels, poems, essays, films, and digital compositions that are intended for global audiences. Additionally, her scholarship considers how multilingual artworks help us understand local communities, including those at colleges and universities. Provost Walkowitz’s next book, which is forthcoming from Columbia University Press, is titled The New Multilingualism: Knowing and Not Knowing Languages in Literature, Culture, and the Classroom. She earned her undergraduate degree at Harvard-Radcliffe College (the women's college that was fully incorporated into Harvard University in 1999) and completed her graduate education at the University of Sussex and Harvard. As an undergraduate, she served as the 118th president of The Harvard Crimson, the nation’s oldest continuously published daily college newspaper.
Jhumpa Lahiri is a bilingual writer, translator, and literary critic born in London and raised in the United States. She is Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English, Director of the Creative Writing Program, and Affiliate Faculty in the Comparative Literature and Translation Studies and Italian Programs at Barnard College. In English, she is the author of two short-story collections (Interpreter of Maladies; Unaccustomed Earth) and two novels (The Namesake; The Lowland) all of which explore the experiences of Bengali immigrants in the United States. In Italian, she has written two works of non-fiction: In altre parole (translated into English by Ann Goldstein as In Other Words, and Il vestito dei libri (translated as The Clothing of Books by Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush. In Italian, she as also published the novel Dove mi trovo (self-translated as Whereabouts), and a volume of poetry entitled Il quaderno di Nerina (forthcoming in English as Nerina’s notebook). She has translated three novels by the Italian writer Domenico Starnone, and is the editor of The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories. A contributor for over twenty-five years to The New Yorker magazine, she has published critical essays on authors including Ovid, Dante, Primo Levi, Alessandro Manzoni, and James Joyce. The subject of her doctoral dissertation was an analysis of the Italian palazzo as setting and metaphor in English Jacobean drama.