Quiver and Fixity: On Rereading “Jude the Obscure”

Join Pulitzer Prize–winning writer and translator Jhumpa Lahiri for the annual Finzi-Contini Lecture as she offers fresh insight into a literary classic.

This lecture will explore the oscillating energy of Thomas Hardy’s final work of fiction, tracing themes of stillness, solitude, perturbation, and permanence. Mythical frameworks will serve to consider the wavering nature of identity, the looming proximity of the underworld, and the condition of feeling both confined and unsettled in this famously unsettling novel.

Jhumpa Lahiri is an award-winning bilingual writer and translator who divides her time between New York and Italy. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies, her debut story collection, which explores issues of love and identity among immigrants and cultural transplants. She is the author of several books, including The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and Lowland. Her most recent novel is Roman Stories (Racconti Romani). Translated into English by Lahiri and Todd Portnowitz, the book was named a New Yorker 2023 Best Book of the Year. In it she explores issues of translation-as-metamorphoses and the protean self. Lahiri is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College, Columbia University. She was named Commander of the Italian Republic in 2019 by President Sergio Mattarella.

Cosponsored by Whitney Humanities Center and The Yale Review

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