Between Words & Worlds
Writer and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo will discuss her most recent novel, A Lover's Discourse, which might be described in part as Barthes through Chinese eyes.
Professor Carol Gluck will interview the author about the themes of language, identity, and migration that run through the book, which was completed during Guo’s fellowship at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination in 2018-19.
“The work of Xiaolu Guo both plays with this globalization of literature and rebukes it. The problems she treats—alienation, displacement, borders—repeat like memories across her work. Guo’s English, with its deliberate missteps, its open confusion, and its pockets of cold, is perhaps better able to capture a certain kind of alienation that people feel when being forced to communicate in a language that isn’t native to them.”—New York Review of Books.
