Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature)

Nicholas Jenkins, a writer on culture and literature, discusses W.H. Auden's views on poetry and history, the connection between Auden's voice and class identity, the symbolic island of Englishness in his poetry, his political ideologies and their influence on his work, his famous poem and its meaning, his conversion to Christianity and the power of poetry, and his decision to omit a poem from his collected works.

Paul Robinson works on the history of European (and sometimes American) thought in the 19th and 20th centuries. His writing has focused on three topics. The first is the history of psychoanalysis. The second is the history of ideas about human sexuality, especially the experience of gays and lesbians. The third is the connection between […]

Lanier Anderson was educated at Yale (A.B., 1987) and the University of Pennsylvania (M.A., Ph.D., 1993). He works in the history of late modern philosophy, focusing primarily on Kant and his influence on 19th c. philosophy. He is the author of articles on Kant's theoretical philosophy, on Nietzsche, and on the neo-Kantian movement. He is […]

Professor Marjorie Perloff is Professor Emerita of English at Stanford and Scholar in Residence at USC. She was educated at Barnard College, where she received her B.A. (1953) and at the Catholic University of America where she received her Ph.D. in English (1965). She teaches courses and writes on twentieth and twenty-first century poetry and poetics, […]

Giovanni Tempesta has been a lecturer in Italian at Stanford University since 1983 and has taught at all levels of language instruction. He is the author of the Italian grammar book “Questa bellissima lingua italiana, impariamola insieme!” and has just published his Italian translation of “The Cremation of Sam McGee” and “Other Verses” by Robert […]

Blakey Vermeule earned her Ph.D. in English Literature at UC Berkeley in 1995, and she has been Professor of English at Stanford University since 2005. Blakey Vermeule's research interests are British literature from 1660-1800, critical theory, cognitive approaches to literature, major British poets, post-Colonial fiction, and the history of the novel. She is the author […]

Laura Wittman received her Ph.D. in 2001 from Yale University where she completed her dissertation in the Department of Italian Language and Literature. The title of her dissertation is “Mystics Without God: Spirituality and Form in Italian and French Modernism,” an analysis of the historical and intellectual context for the self-descriptive use of the term […]

Hayden White is a historian and literary theorist. He is professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he taught for many years in the History of Consciousness program, and he is currently a professor of comparative literature at Stanford University. His many books include Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973), […]