American Academy President Patricia Meyer Spacks Addresses Joint
Meeting of the Academy and the Boston Athenaeum
On April 10, 2003, Patricia
Meyer Spacks, the President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
addressed the second annual joint meeting of the Academy and the Boston
Athenaeum. Spacks, an authority on eighteenth-century English literature, spoke
on "How to Read a Diary." The joint meeting continues the longstanding
collaboration between the two institutions.
As Spacks explained,
"It's not hard to understand why people enjoy reading diaries of the famous: in
order to get an inside glimpse of exceptional lives. Nor is it difficult to
know why Boswell's London Journal was a best-seller: good stories, bawdy bits.
Pepys provides similar appeal; Virginia Woolf's diaries supply mini-essays on
the literary life; one can multiply examples. But what is the attraction of
diaries that offer only records of uneventful and undistinguished lives? Two
such diaries, kept over long spans of time by eighteenth-century writers
unknown except for their daily accounts, provide test cases for assessing the
interest of what might be called 'hidden narratives.' The writers, an American
Quaker woman living in Philadelphia and an English country clergyman, both
lived through the years of the American War for Independence, although neither
makes that war a primary subject for reflection. Investigation of these diaries
reveals techniques for analyzing and appreciating the superficially unappealing
and demonstrates the rewards of analysis."
The Edgar F. Shannon
Professor of English at the University of Virginia, Spacks has written on the
poets and novelists of the time in such books as The Poetry of Vision and
Desire and Truth. She has also authored books and essays on cultural as
well as literary subjects, including adolescence, boredom, gossip, and women
writers from the eighteenth century to the present. Her new books, Privacy:
Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self, will be published this spring
by the University of Chicago Press. Spacks is chair of the board of directors
of the American Council of Learned Societies and a trustee of the National
Humanities Center.
The American Academy
was founded in 1780 by John Adams and other scholar-patriots "to
cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor,
dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people." The
current membership of over 3,700 Fellows and 600 Foreign Honorary Members
includes more than 150 Nobel laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners. Drawing
on the wide-ranging expertise of its membership, the Academy conducts
thoughtful, innovative, non-partisan studies on international security, social
policy, education, and the humanities.
Back to Press Releases
|