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East Bend: Know Monsters- Here Be Dragons

Gantt Gurley  Event Type: Adult Program
Age Group(s): Adult
Date: 10/18/2018
Start Time: 6:00 PM
End Time: 7:00 PM
Description:
 University of Oregon Professor Gantt Gurley dives into dragons.

University of Oregon Professor Gantt Gurley dives into dragons, examining the Indo-European dragon from ancient to medieval and modern literatures. Special emphasis will be given to the formation of the modern dragon and how J.R.R. Tolkien shaped and solidified our contemporary notion of this mythical and enigmatic monster.

Gantt Gurley received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007. Before coming to University of Oregon he lectured at the University of California’s Scandinavian Department and was a Harry Starr Fellow in Judaica at the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. His monograph Meïr Aaron Goldschmidt and the Poetics of Jewish Fiction examines one of Denmark’s greatest nationalistic writers as first and foremost a Jewish artist, exploring his relationship to the Hebrew Bible and later Rabbinical traditions such as the Talmud and the Midrash as a form of poetics. He is currently working on two future publications. The first is a joint project that is mapping the sudden appearance of Rabbinic tales in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century vernaculars in Northern Europe. The second is a study of the Wandering Jew legend in Long Romanticism, from Goethe and Schiller to Andersen and Hawthorne. A central aim of both projects and his research at large is to illuminate the mechanisms whereby Hebraic thought is reawakened in the European consciousness. His research and teaching interests include ancient and medieval song culture, the birth of the novel, Romanticism, Old Icelandic literature, the lyrical mode, fairy tales and folklore, heroes and monsters, and notions of religiosity in the Danish Golden Age.


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Library: East Bend Public Library
Location: Meeting Room
Contact: Paige M. Ferro
Contact Number: 5413121063
Presenter: Gantt Gurley