William H. Gass Symposium
Washington University Libraries, the Committee on Comparative Literature, the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities will co-sponsor the William H. Gass Symposium: International Writing on September 23 at Umrath Lounge and Olin Library. The symposium will examine Gass' literary work in translation, the importance of his work as a literary critic, and his role in promoting international writing. The Committee on Comparative Literature has invited Washington University alumna Susan Bernofsky to speak as this year's Matheson lecturer.
For the detailed schedule of events and information about symposium presenters, click here.
William H. Gass, PhD, is a world-renowned author and literary critic. He was the founder (in 1990) and first director of the university’s International Writers Center in Arts & Sciences — now known as The Center for the Humanities. Gass received an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree from Washington University in 2005. He is the author of Omensetter’s Luck (1966), In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories (1968), Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife (1968), Fiction and the Figures of Life (1971), On Being Blue (1976), The World Within the Word (1978), Habitations of the Word: Essays (1985), The Tunnel (1995), Finding a Form (1996), Cartesian Sonata (1998), Reading Rilke (1999), Tests of Time (2003), A Temple of Texts (2006), Life Sentences (2012), Middle C (2013), and Eyes (2015).
He has won several major literary awards during his career, including the National Book Critics Circle Award an unprecedented three times: in 1985 for Habitations of the Word; in 1996 for Finding a Form; and in 2003 for Tests of Time. He also won the 1997 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award and the PEN/Nabokov Lifetime Achievement Award, which he has called his “most prized prize.” The Tunnel won the American Book Award in 1996 (and was produced by Lorin Cuoco as an audiobook as read by Gass in 2006). Gass was awarded the PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay in 2003. A Temple of Texts (2006) won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, and Middle C (2013) won the 2015 William Dean Howells Award. In 2007, St. Louis University awarded Gass the St. Louis Literary Award.
Gass, who retired from teaching in 1999, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1982 and to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983. He received an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction in 1975 and Medal of Merit for Fiction in 1979.
Author and translator Susan Bernofsky directs the program Literary Translation at Columbia in the MFA Writing Program at the Columbia University School of the Arts. Among her many published translations are retranslations of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha (Modern Library, 2006), Franz Kafka's classic black comedy of nightmarish transformation, The Metamorphosis (Norton, 2014), and Jeremias Gotthelf's 19th century tale of horror, The Black Spider (NYRB Classics, 2013). She specializes in the work of the great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser – she has translated eight of his books, including Microscripts, Berlin Stories, The Walk, and Looking at Pictures and is writing his biography. Her new libretto for Mozart’s The Magic Flute premiered in May 2014 at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis in a production by Isaac Mizrahi with choreography by John Heginbotham and conducted by Jane Glover. Her most recent translation, of Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel The End of Days, won the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the 2015 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
In 2014 she was named a Guggenheim Fellow. Her previous awards include the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize 
and the 2012 Hermann Hesse Translation Prize of the City of Calw, as well as grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the PEN Translation Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center and the Lannan Foundation. From 2011 – 2014 she chaired the Translation Committee of the PEN American Center. Currently she serves on the Board of the American Literary Translators Association. In 2013 she co-edited (with Esther Allen) the Columbia University Press anthology In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means, featuring thoughts on translation by leading voices in the field.
Other symposium participants include: Lorin Cuoco, Matthias Göritz, Ignacio Infante, Katja Perat, Stephen Schenkenberg, Lynne Tatlock, Karlis Verdins and Gerhild Williams.