Martin Puchner
Martin Puchner, Keynote Speaker
Martin Puchner is the Byron and Anita Wien Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is the general editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature and the Norton Anthology of Western Literature. His (massive open online course) has brought four thousand years of literature to students across the globe. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Literature isn’t just for book-lovers. Ever since it emerged four thousand years ago, it has shaped the lives of most humans on planet earth. —From "The Written World" by Martin Puchner
In his delightful and important book, The Written Word: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization (a Random House Hardcover and eBook, OSD: 10/24/17), Martin Puchner tells the story of literature and its power to shape people, civilizations and world history by exploring 16 selected key stories from more than 4,000 years of world literature. Beginning with the Iliad's influence on Alexander the Great on through to J. K. Rowling today, The Written World takes us on a remarkable journey through history, as Puchner tells stories of people whose lives and beliefs led them to create groundbreaking texts that affected the world they were born into, and the world in which we live today. Puchner describes four stages of literature, from the first written story, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and Ezra’s creation of Holy Scripture, to the teachings of Buddha, Confucius, Socrates and Jesus and the first great novel in world literature, the Tale of Genji, written by a Japanese woman known as Murasaki. In Baghdad we learn about Scheherazade and the stories of the One Thousand and One Nights. We watch the astonishing survival of the Maya epic Popol Vuh. In the modern era, we find Cervantes's battling pirates—both real pirates and literary pirates who publish a fake sequel to Don Quixote—and we follow the breathtaking rise in influence of The Communist Manifesto. Along the way, we learn fascinating facts and insights about people—how Gutenberg paved the way for Luther, Ben Franklin’s pioneering work as a media entrepreneur, Goethe’s invention of world literature in Sicily, and Akhmatova’s and Solzhenitsyn’s secret writings in the Soviet Union. We visit Troy, Pergamum and China and speak with Derek Wolcott in the Caribbean, Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul and the wordsmiths of Sunjata, an oral epic, in West Africa. Throughout The Written World, Puchner captures the inventions—writing technologies, the printing press, the book—that have shaped religion, politics and commerce. In this "unique and spellbinding book" (Elaine Scarry), Puchner shows how literature turned our planet into a written world.