Stephen Greenblatt is the next author to come to Syracuse to as part of the Rosamond Gifford Lecture Series 2015-16 season at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 14.
Greenblatt has made a career out of understanding literature through its cultural context and finding scholarly history through literature itself, making him a founding father of New Historicism and also a Pulitzer Prize-winning author for his most recent work, "The Swerve: How the World Became Modern."
The Harvard University professor and "The Norton Shakespeare" editor took time out of a busy day to speak with Syracuse.com about how the world is full of unknown game changers and how technology has influenced the quality of his Shakespeare students today.
Below is a condensed version of that conversation:
Your most recent book addresses how one man saved Lucretius "On the Nature of Things," an action that helped mold the modern age of literature. Do you think there could even be a modern-day Bracciolini in terms of literature and in terms of keeping print alive?
We actually are constantly taken by surprise. That's one of the odd things about our lives, and that expands from people with whom we pay a great big deal of money to what happens when you wake up in the morning and don't know how the rest of the day is going to play out. My guess is that yes; right now there are things that are going to change the world drastically and radically. The tricky thing's we don't know what they are. We just have to keep ourselves sort of nimble and open.
What modern-day author's work can you see making a profound literary impact as Lucretius?
Almost by definition we can't say. I was very struck by [the] news [that] the Nobel Prize in Literature going to Svetlana Alexievich of Belarus. I happen to have read a work of hers, an absolutely remarkable book about testimonies of people who had been affected by the disasters and nuclear accidents in the Ukraine. It's an amazing work that's not well-known. But that's the kind of thing where you wouldn't have ever predicted the Nobel Prize was going to such a person. A series of interviews with people who survived Chernobyl? It's incredibly powerful and it's that kind of surprise that is interesting to me.
What is on your pleasure reading list as of now?
I tend to read two or three different things at once for pleasure. Every once in a while, I like to read something in a foreign language just to keep my languages going. I am reading Voltaire's "Candide." I'm actually enjoying that quite a lot. Then I'm reading a book by a British travel writer named Colin Thubron. Called "To a Mountain in Tibet," about a trek he took in Tibet in the wake of his mother's death. It's quite remarkable.
How do you make the time among that, your research and teaching?
I'm not such a great time manager, but I'm reasonably good at staying on task. Actually, it's more that I actually want to spend time with my 14-year-old and with my wife and with my older children and grandchildren. I don't want to just work all the time. Somehow, it all gets done. I think the simplest answer is that I watch very little television. I spend almost no time on social media. That opens up quite a bit of time that disappears otherwise pretty easily.
I read your article in The New York Times and you talked about how your love of Shakespeare in rooted in your childhood. But you also said the goose bumps that you received from him don't seem to be the same experience of your students. Why do you think that's so and how do you think technology influenced that?
The negative thing to say would be that there's kind of a culture of distraction. People are constantly multi-tasking, doing two or three different things at once. It's much harder to sit down for an extended period of time and think or read or write than it used to be. It's very easy to sound completely negative about it. But, I tried in The New York Times to say that it's not just all negative. It's a complicated trade-off. Everything's a trade off. I have fantastically good students, they're just not good in the way that fantastically good students in the past were. They're different and they're better at some things and not so good at other things. Because I teach Shakespeare a lot of the time, it's possible to make the transition more easily because Shakespeare was for all kinds of media, including performance and not only for the page. But, the world is definitely changing, no question about it.
I read that your next project is on Adam and Eve. What made you want to dive into that topic?
I'm interested in the power of storytelling, and that's probably the most powerful, in the sense of the most influential and successful story ever written in our world. It changed the lives of millions of people over a very long period of time because it's the way in which people for centuries and centuries understood the nature of their lives. Why life was hard. Why there was death. Why you had to work. Why women scream when they gave birth to children, so forth and so on. It was a crucial origin myth of the origin story of three great world religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It's a story, so I'm fascinated by why a story should've played that role and what happened, how the story got that way and what happened when it came under increasing question as it has done in the last 500 years.