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Caltech

Literary Dimensions Seminar

Monday, February 11, 2019
4:00pm to 5:00pm
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Dabney Hall 110 (Treasure Room)
"Watch Your Back!" Saul Bellow, The Dean's December, and the Gromer Case
Zachary Leader, Professor of English Literature, University of Roehampton,

Zachary Leader, author of the acclaimed and "monumental" two-volume biography The Life of Saul Bellow (2016 and 2018), discusses in this lecture Bellow's The Dean's December (1982). This novel began its life at Caltech, where Bellow and his wife Alexandra Tulcea Bellow visited for a semester in 1979, she as a Sherman Fairchild Fellow in Mathematics, and he as a spouse "well-known in his field." Drawing on his unparalleled knowledge of Bellow's life, Leader explores how the novel engages the themes of violence and nihilism, the claims of fiction over journalism, and the failings of American materialism.

For more information, please contact Cecilia Lu by phone at 626-395-1724 or by email at [email protected].