April 7, 1998

11th Annual Quint Lecture to be

delivered by Berkeley Professor Robert Alter

“The David Story and the Beginnings of Political

Fiction”

Professor Robert Alter of the University of California

at Berkeley will give a lecture titled “The David Story and

the Beginnings of Political Fiction” on Sunday, April 19

at 7:30 p.m. in Middlebury College’s Dana Auditorium on College

Street (Route 125). His talk, which is the 11th annual Hannah

A. Quint Lecture in Jewish Studies, is sponsored by the religion

department of Middlebury College. The event is free and open to

the public.

Professor Alter is a professor of Hebrew and comparative

literature at the University of California at Berkeley, where

he has taught since 1967. He has written widely on the European

novel from the 18th century to the present, on contemporary American

fiction, and on modern Hebrew literature. He has also written

extensively on literary aspects of the Bible.

His 17 published books include two prize-winning

volumes on biblical narrative and poetry, and an award-winning

translation of Genesis. He has devoted studies to Fielding, Stendhal,

and the self-reflexive tradition in the novel. Among his recent

titles are “The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age”

(1989), “Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka,

Benjamin, and Scholem” (1991), “Hebrew and Modernity”

(1994), and “Genesis: Translation and Commentary” (1996).

The Hannah A. Quint Lecture in Jewish Studies was

established in 1987 by Hannah A. Quint and her son Eliot Levinson,

a 1964 alumnus of Middlebury College. The mandate of the lectureship

is to provoke thought in the College, the Middlebury community,

and in the region on current issues in Jewish history, religion,

and culture.