Virginia Nixon Memorial Lecture. Speaker: Beth Blum and Jean-Christophe Cloutier

So Many Books, So Little Time

Our title is taken from the prompt for the Liberal Arts College’s entrance essay competition the year we arrived at the College (2001). Treating it as a theme that continues to inform our work, our co-lecture will touch on some of the ways in which the literary helps to structure our time on earth. Dr. Jean-Christophe Cloutier will turn to Jack Kerouac’s building of his own personal archive and nascent literary project as a “lifetime form,” while Dr. Beth Blum will take us into the contemporary literary scene, where authors turn to new genres in order to pose old questions about how to live. 

Beth Blum is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at Harvard University, completing her manuscript on the literary history of the self-improvement industry. Blum’s work has appeared in Modern Language Quarterly, Cabinet magazine, Public Books, Aeon, Oh Comely, and elsewhere. Her latest writing is forthcoming with PMLA and Modernism/modernity. 

Jean-Christophe Cloutier is assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He recently co-edited a scholarly edition of Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth (Penguin Classics, 2017), and is the editor of Jack Kerouac’s French manuscripts, La vie est d’hommage (Boréal, 2016). He also translated Kerouac’s two French novellas for The Library of America’s The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings (2016), and is currently a Fellow at Harvard U’s Hutchins Center where he is completing a monograph entitled “Archival Vagabonds: The Peripatetic Lives of Literary Papers.”