Jun
27
6:00pm
James J. Berg, Chris Freeman, & guests present "Isherwood in Transit"
By Vroman's & Book Soup Live
About Isherwood in Transit
"Perhaps I had traveled too much, left my heart in too many places," muses the narrator of Christopher Isherwood's novel Prater Violet (1945), which he wrote in his adopted home of Los Angeles after years of dislocation and desperation. In Isherwood in Transit, James J.Berg and Chris Freeman bring together diverse Isherwood scholars to understand the challenges this writer faced as a consequence of his travel.
Based on a conference at the Huntington Library, where Isherwood's recently opened papers are held, Isherwood in Transit considers the writer not as an English, continental, or American writer but as a transnational one, whose identity, politics, and beliefs were constantly transformed by global connections and engagements arising from journeys to Germany, Japan, China, and Argentina; his migration to the United States; and his conversion to Vedanta Hinduism in the 1940s.
Approaching Isherwood's rootlessness and restlessness from various perspectives, these essays show that long after he made a new home in California and became an American citizen, Christopher Isherwood remained unsettled, although his wanderings became spiritual and personal rather than geographic. (University of Minnesota Press)
About the speakers
James J. Berg is associate dean of faculty at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, and editor of Isherwood on Writing (Minnesota, 2008).
Chris Freeman is professor of English and gender studies at the University of Southern California. They are coeditors of The American Isherwood (Minnesota, 2014), Conversations with Christopher Isherwood, and The Isherwood Century.
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