Can wisdom be taught?
That is the theme of Emory University’s prestigious Ellmann Lectures this year. The biannual literary series, which is free and open to the public, brings National Book Award finalist Min Jin Lee to Atlanta March 1-3 for three events.
Lee is the author of 2017’s “Pachinko” (Grand Central Publishing, $30), a sweeping historical novel about Koreans living in Japan that was made into a limited series for Apple TV. She will deliver two lectures — “The Education of a Writer” and “Writing American” — and hold a “Creativity Conversation” with Atlanta novelist Tayari Jones. The latter event will be video recorded and posted online afterward.
Education — its value and the sacrifices made to achieve it — is a theme running through Lee’s upcoming novel “American Hagwon” (Cardinal, Sept. 29). The family saga traces the triumphs and tribulations of the Koh family as they learn to navigate new value systems while immigrating from Seoul to Sydney to Orange County, California.
Credit: Emory University
Credit: Emory University
When it comes to selecting authors for the Ellmann Lectures, organizers “aim to find a speaker who is going to speak to students about what it means to be a reader and a writer and a thinker in the world they’re in today,” said director Geraldine Higgins, an associate professor of English and director of Irish studies at Emory. “We don’t want it to be a stuffy academic exercise. We want it to involve the whole community and have the sense of celebrating literature.”
Director since 2017, Higgins said her goal in the role is to broaden the program’s selection of authors.
“This is our first Asian American writer,” she said. “There is a huge population of Asian American students that we want to be excited to come to this series and to hear her talk about what it’s like to be a Korean American and a writer in the diaspora.”
The Ellmann Lectures were founded in 1988 in memory of Richard Ellmann, Emory’s first Woodruff professor. A literary scholar who wrote the definitive, National Book Award-winning biography of James Joyce, Ellmann taught at Emory in the ‘80s until his death.
Ellman “had a gift for speaking to people in language they understood about the important matters of literature,” said Higgins, who describes the lectures as a way to “take literature seriously.”
“That’s something Min Jin Lee also embodies in her work,” said Higgins. “She says, ‘Books have found me at every stage of my life.’ And she says, ‘It reminds me that if a character could change, so can I.’ She’s really using and thinking about literature in these kinds of important terms that in a way all of us here in the humanities are doing today in our teaching and our writing.”
Lee joins a pantheon of highly acclaimed authors who have delivered Ellmann Lectures over the years, including Seamus Heaney, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco, Margaret Atwood, Mario Vargas Llosa and Natasha Trethewey.
Although she hasn’t yet met Lee, Higgins has spoken with her on several occasions.
“I’m so excited for our students to experience what it’s like to talk to her. She’s so intelligent, and engaged and interested,” Higgins said. “She’s so involved in what you might call the ethics of literature in terms of … things that we learn from literature will make us deeper thinkers (and foster) a deeper engagement in our own life and our own world.”
As for the question at the heart of the event: Can wisdom be taught? Higgins assures the answer is affirmative. “We’re all out of a job if it can’t,” she said.
The Ellmann Lectures will be held at Emory’s Schwartz Center March 1-3. Tickets are free but must be reserved here. For details go to ellmann.emory.edu.
Suzanne Van Atten is a columnist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She may be reached at Suzanne.VanAtten@ajc.com.
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