William H. Gass and Lorin Cuoco here present an edited but uncut record of the proceedings of the first international conference convened by the International Writers Center at Washington University in St. Louis.
The topic - the writer in politics - was divided into three parts: politics as material for the writers' work, politics as a threatening power over the pen, and politics as a viewpoint held by writers. Major addresses were delivered by Breyten Breytenbach, a white South African who was an early critic of apartheid serving seven years in jail before being exiled from his homeland; Nuruddin Farah, the Somali author of a number of internationally recognized novels, who has also suffered exile; Carolyn Forché, an American poet whose experience as a Guggenheim fellow in El Salvador led to her noted second book of poetry, The Country Between Us; Antonio Skármeta, the Chilean short story writer, screen writer, and novelist whose Insurrection deals with the Nicaraguan Revolution; Luisa Valenzuela, and Argentine novelist and journalist who fled her home country in 1979 and returned a decade later to find remnants of the former military regime still a legitimate target for her absurdist! prose; and Mario Vargas Llosa, the widely acclaimed Peruvian novelist who founded Libeertad, the political party under whose banner he unsuccessfully ran for president of his country.
The Writer in Politics also includes edited transcriptions of the panel discussions that followed each of the six major addresses. Panelists included Eavan Boland, Marc Chénetier, Robert Coover, Ron Himes, Liu Binyan, Eric Pankey, Anton Shammas, Richard Watson and William Gass.
The topic - the writer in politics - was divided into three parts: politics as material for the writers' work, politics as a threatening power over the pen, and politics as a viewpoint held by writers. Major addresses were delivered by Breyten Breytenbach, a white South African who was an early critic of apartheid serving seven years in jail before being exiled from his homeland; Nuruddin Farah, the Somali author of a number of internationally recognized novels, who has also suffered exile; Carolyn Forché, an American poet whose experience as a Guggenheim fellow in El Salvador led to her noted second book of poetry, The Country Between Us; Antonio Skármeta, the Chilean short story writer, screen writer, and novelist whose Insurrection deals with the Nicaraguan Revolution; Luisa Valenzuela, and Argentine novelist and journalist who fled her home country in 1979 and returned a decade later to find remnants of the former military regime still a legitimate target for her absurdist! prose; and Mario Vargas Llosa, the widely acclaimed Peruvian novelist who founded Libeertad, the political party under whose banner he unsuccessfully ran for president of his country.
The Writer in Politics also includes edited transcriptions of the panel discussions that followed each of the six major addresses. Panelists included Eavan Boland, Marc Chénetier, Robert Coover, Ron Himes, Liu Binyan, Eric Pankey, Anton Shammas, Richard Watson and William Gass.
Used availability for William H Gass's The Writer in Politics