David Bosworth with Nandini Pandey: LIVING IN LANGUAGE

About this event

Author and cultural critic David Bosworth visits Baltimore from The University of Washington’s Creative Writing Program to discuss his latest book Living in Language: The Literary Word at Work in the World! Dr. Nandini Pandey, Associate Professor of Classics at Johns Hopkins University, will join Bosworth in conversation to consider the power and relevance of the literary imagination throughout history. In a series of essays both lyrical and analytical, Living in Language examines how certain works have engaged the most pressing problems of their authors’ ages even as they illuminate challenges that still haunt the world. From the spiritual quest of a musical prose to the cinematic craft of amending America’s foundational story; from the myth of the Fall to novels that probe the Internet’s impact on our lives today, Bosworth reveals how the literary imagination honors the “living” prescribed by the human predicament, evoking its beauty while never stinting on its uncertainties, cruelties, and pain. Book Endorsements: “Capacious and precise, critical and sympathetic, deeply cultured and thoroughly down-to-earth, David Bosworth’s Living in Language engages the reader with free-ranging enthusiasm: whether elaborating on James Fenimore Cooper, Wallace Stevens, or Patricia Lockwood, his prose is distinguished by originality and vividness. Even as he laments the instrumental rationalism of our age, Bosworth offers a glimpse of a present that contains “so many riches to assay here, so much pain to parse and beauty to acclaim.” This book is to be acclaimed.” –Peter Campion, author of Radical as Reality: Form and Freedom in American Poetry “David Bosworth is not only one of the sharpest, most perceptive cultural critics around, he has even come up with a way we might think our way out of the mess we are in. No one who cares about the condition of our culture can afford to ignore Conscientious Thinking.” –Jackson Lears, editor, Raritan

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