Join author Frederic Tuten and moderator Richard Fletcher (Classics) for a discussion of Tuten's novels, short fictions, and his memoirs-in-progress. Since his first novel The Adventures of Mao on the Long March (1971), Tuten has crafted literary narratives in direct response to the ideas and challenges of the visual arts. Artists as diverse as Poussin, Delacroix, Van Gogh, Roy Lichtenstein, Jeff Koons, and Pierre Huyghe either populate Tuten's fictions or have their works appropriated and reproduced in the fictional worlds he imagines. Tuten's engagement with visual artists both recalls authors who incorporate discussions of the contemporary art world in their works (e.g. Enrique Vila-Matas, Tom McCarthy) as well as the phenomenon of artists turning to literary narratives as part of extended conceptual practices (e.g. Seth Price and other works archived in the recent Book Lovers project at http://www.thebooklovers.info/).
Frederic Tuten grew up in the Bronx and later lived in South America and Paris, where he taught film and literature at the University of Paris 8. He has written about art, literature and film in Art Forum, The New York Times, Vogue; was an actor in an Alain Resnais movie; taught with Paul Bowles in Morocco; and co-wrote the cult-classic film Possession, which is being screened at the Wexner Center for the Arts on Thursday, Sept. 1. He has earned three Pushcart Prizes for fiction, an O'Henry Prize for a short story, a PhD in literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Award for Distinguished Writing from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He is the author of five novels: The Adventures of Mao on the Long March; Tintin in the New World; Tallien: A Brief Romance; Van Gogh’s Bad Café; and The Green Hour; he's also written a book of inter-related short stories, Self Portraits: Fictions. He is currently completing a memoir.
This event is supported by The Humanities and the Arts Discovery Theme Project and co-sponsored by Project Narrative. It is free and open to the public.
