Marina van Zuylen
"The Ways we Miss our Lives is Life:  Theories and Practice of  the Good Enough"
Friday, September 20, 2024
Washington Duke Inn

Marina van Zuylen is the Clemente Chair in the Humanities and Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Bard College. She has published five monographs: Difficulty as an Aesthetic Principle (Gunter Narr, 1993), Monomania (Cornell UP, 2005), The Plenitude of Distraction (MIT & Sequence Press, 2017), Mademoiselle Bistouri Di Baudelaire O Dell’Insensatezza (Solfanelli, 2022), and Éloge des vertus minuscules (Flammarion, 2023). Additional editions of her work are available or forthcoming in Spanish, Korean, and Arabic. Prof. van Zuylen’s work grapples with a core identity of productivity in liberal economic modernity, exploring the tensions of difficulty as an aesthetic, monomania, and meritocracy, while praising modes one might align with receptivity: distraction, sympathetic imagination, artisanal arts, non-linear thinking, and the virtues of characters who are not the hero. A leader in Public Humanities, Prof. van Zuylen also has long served as the National Academic Director of a free college course for underserved adults, the Clemente Course. She is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal.