GEORGE BORNSTEIN has written six critical books on nineteenth and twentieth century literature, including ‘Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page’ (Cambridge UP, 2001) and most recently ‘The Colors of Zion: Blacks, Jews, and Irish’ (Harvard UP, 2010). A long-time student of British, Irish, and American modernism, he has produced several major editions of modernist works, including two volumes of Yeats’s early poetry for the Cornell Yeats Series and the recently published ‘Early Essays of W. B. Yeats’ (Scribners). Bornstein is currently C. A. Patrides Professor of Literature Emeritus at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and past president of the Society for Textual Scholarship.
DESCRIPTION OF TALK
George Bornstein extends to book history the argument of his new book The Colors of Zion: Blacks, Jews, and Irish (Harvard UP, 2010), which the New Yorker called “a fascinating intellectual experiment [which] applies current theories of cultural hybridity to older conceptions of race, and asks the reader to imagine what race has meant and means today…. The Colors of Zion holds deep implications for where multiculturalism has been and where it could go.” In his lecture, Bornstein will use as his main examples Frederick Douglass’ trip to Ireland during the Famine, the reception of the first talking movie “The Jazz Singer,” and publication of modernist literature by Blacks, Jews, and Irish in the 1920s.
This event is sponsored by the Center for the History of the Book.
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