On Monday, December 15, Mutlu Konuk Blasing, a distinguished professor of American literature at Brown University, will deliver a special lecture entitled “Edgar Allan Poe: The Tyranny of the Word,” organized by the Department of American Culture and Literature. The lecture will deal with the poetic language of Edgar Allan Poe, one of the great figures of American literature.
Prof. Blasing is the author of numerous influential books, including “Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry: O’Hara, Bishop, Ashbery, and Merrill” (Cambridge University Press, 2009), “Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words” (Princeton University Press, 2007), “American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms” (Yale University Press, 1987) and “The Art of Life: Studies in American Autobiographical Literature” (University of Texas Press, 1977).
With her husband Randy Blasing, Prof. Blasing published nine volumes of translated Nazım Hikmet works between 1975 and 2012. These books played a major role in giving Nazım Hikmet wider exposure in the Anglo-American literary world. In 2013 she published an important critical work, “Nazım Hikmet: The Life and Times of Turkey’s World Poet,” the Turkish translation of which is about to be published by Yapı Kredi Yayınları.
The lecture on Edgar Allan Poe will be in English. It will start at 12:40 p.m. on Monday, December 15 in the FEASS building’s A-130 seminar room.