David Bosworth with Nandini Pandey: LIVING IN LANGUAGE

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

Order LIVING IN LANGUAGE here!

David Bosworth’s fiction and literary and cultural essays have been published in numerous journals, including "Ploughshares," "The Agni Review," "Salmagundi," "The Georgia Review," “Raritan,” “Hedgehog Review,” and “Sinn und Form,” the journal of Germany’s Academy of the Arts. His collection of short fiction, The Death of Descartes, won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and a special citation from PEN and the Ernest Hemingway Foundation. His novel, From My Father, Singing was a recipient of the Editors' Book Award. The recipient of Ingram Merrill and N.E.A. fellowships, he is the author most recently of Conscientious Thinking (a book of cultural analysis) and Living in Language, a collection of his literary essays. A resident of Seattle, Bosworth is a professor in, and the former director of, the University of Washington's Creative Writing Program.

Nandini Pandey is a Romanist broadly interested in Latin literature, political and intellectual history, visual culture, and the conversations among them. She loves interrogating how meanings are made and change over time and across media; how words, images, and built environments interact with humans; and how identities and ideologies have been constructed alongside interpretations of the classics, from antiquity to the present day.

Professor Pandey's prize-winning first monograph, The Poetics of Power in Augustan Rome: Latin Poetic Responses to Early Imperial Iconography (Cambridge 2018), explores the role of Roman writers, readers, and artists in creating and contesting Augustus' public image from below. Her second book project explores social practices, legal underpinnings, and lived experiences of ethnic and cultural diversity in the Roman empire, with an eye toward modern diversity and inclusion initiatives. This research has been generously supported, among others, by the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Academy in Berlin, a Basel Fellowship in Latin Literature, the Loeb Classical Library Foundation, and the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin.

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