Kimon Friar Lecture: Δίπλ’ ἐρέω: Τwice-told Tales
in Borges, Proust, and Cavafy

Kimon Friar Lecture: Δίπλ’ ἐρέω: Τwice-told Tales
in Borges, Proust, and Cavafy

Kimon Friar Lecture 2024-2025

By Alexander Nehamas
Edmund N. Carpenter II Class of 1943
Professor in the Humanities
Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature
Emeritus Princeton University

 

In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Jorge Luis Borges imagines an author who wants to write (not rewrite, not copy) Cervantes’ novel as a work of his own. Borges quotes a passage from Menard’s Quixote and argues that despite having the very same words as Cervantes’, its meaning is completely different. Borges was probably joking but Marcel Proust certainly was not when he wrote a novel that details his hero’s efforts to become an author and ends when he finally realizes that he is ready to begin writing the novel we have just finished reading! And depending on whether we read it as an account of his life up to the time when he begins to write or as the very novel he wrote once he began, its meaning is radically different. The very same words telling a very different story: A brilliant literary move, common to both the most concise and the most prolific of our literary authors. Behind them both, however, stands C.P. Cavafy, who was the first to tell such double tales, especially in his short, enigmatic poem, “That’s the One” and several others like it.

 

The lecture is free & open to the public and a reception will follow.

Parking upon availability.

For more information, please contact College Events at acgevents@acg.edu. 

Speakers

ACG 150 Dummy Event 2

Alexander Nehamas

Alexander Nehamas was born in Athens, attended Athens College, Swarthmore College and Princeton University, where he taught until his retirement. Before coming to Princeton in 1990, he taught at the Universities of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. At Princeton he chaired the Council of the Humanities and the Program in Hellenic Studies and was Founding Director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. He is the author of Nietzsche: Life as Literature, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault and Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art, On Friendship and translator of Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus. He gave the Sather Classical Lectures at the University of California at Berkeley, the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh and the Tanner Lectures at Yale. He holds the Chair of the History of Philosophy at the Academy of Athens.

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