Writer, Scholar, and Podlich Fellow
Angus Fletcher to Visit the Ath
March 31 for Lecture and Book Signing

Author and scholar Angus Fletcher, the distinguished professor emeritus in the Graduate School at the City University of New York, will visit the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum on Wednesday evening, March 31 to discuss, "The Tipping Point: How Do Humanistic Studies Count?" Fletcher is the Podlich Fellow at Claremont McKenna College this semester and writer in residence at the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies. The public portion of his address begins at 6:45 p.m., with free seating on a first-come basis. The evening will conclude with a book signing in the Athenaeum lobby.
Harold Bloom, author of The Western Canon, describes Fletcher as "an Orphic seer, a curious universal scholar of Renaissance vintage, a fusion of the best traits of Northrop Frye and Kenneth Burke, his true peers His new book on Shakespeare, Marlowe, Donne, Milton and so much more," Bloom adds, "is a marvelous demonstration that cosmology, rhetoric and psychology are not three entities but one. Here they fuse together with the magus Fletcher performing his superb critical alchemy."
Fletcher's research interests include theory of literature, comparative literature, allegory, the literature of nature, Edmund Spenser, and postmodernisms. He is the author of several works, including Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964); Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare (2007); A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination (2006); The Transcendental Masque: An Essay on Milton's Comus (1972); Colors of the Mind: Conjectures on Thinking in Literature (1991); and The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser (1971).
In 2005 Fletcher received the Truman Capote Prize in Literary Criticism, recognizing his A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination (2006). He also is the recipient of a 2007 Senior Fellowship from the Endowment of the Humanities.
In 2008-2009 he was the Getty Professor at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.
In this first of two lectures Professor Fletcher will revisit Sir Charles Snow's 1959 pronouncements on "The Two Cultures," and will discuss a zone of interest shared by the Arts and Sciences, the practice of counting.
In his second Athenaeum lecture on Monday, April 12 ("Poetic Wisdom and the Barbarism of Civilization,") Fletcher will discuss the common belief in cycles of history, shared by many religious believers and by unbelievers such as the poet James Joyce. In the context of Giambattista Vico's revolutionary treatise on history, The New Science, the lecture will suggest that today Americans need to develop what might be called "historical imagination."
Copies of his books, Colors of the Mind; Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare; A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination; The Transcendental Masque: An Essay on Milton's Comus; and Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, will be made available following both lectures.