The Annual Caroline and Joseph S. Gruss Lecture
Fall 2004 : Robert Alter
On Wednesday, December 1, 2004, the Annual Caroline and Joseph S. Gruss Lecture was presented by Robert Alter, Professor of Hebrew & Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkley, at 6:30 PM in Martin Lipton Hall located in D'Agostino Hall. The lecture was entitled " The Power of the Vow in Biblical Narrative ." Following the lecture there was a short cocktail reception.
View Transcript of the Lecture
Robert Alter Biographical Information
Robert Alter, Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, has taught at the University of California at Berkeley since 1967. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, and is past president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He has twice been a Guggenheim Fellow, has been a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, and Old Dominion Fellow at Princeton University.
Professor Alter has written widely on the European novel from the eighteenth century to the present, on contemporary American fiction, and on modern Hebrew literature. He has also written extensively on literary aspects of the Bible. His twenty published books include two prize-winning volumes on biblical narrative and poetry, and an award-winning translation of Genesis. He has devoted book-length studies to Fielding, Stendhal, and the self-reflexive tradition in the novel. Books by him have been translated into eight different languages.
Among his publications over the past fifteen years are Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (1991), Genesis: Translation and Commentary (1996), The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel (1999), Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (2000). and The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (2004).
