"Art is the repository of the things we never did and wish we had done. It is the song of our regrets."
The great writer of fiction and non-fiction André Aciman is here. In the discussion, he and Daniel explore the interplay of time and place. Using Aciman's recent book of essays, Homo Irrealis, as the jumping off point, many questions such as "Where and what is home?" "Who makes up a place?" "What is memory?" come up and are discussed in depth. Irrealis is what Aciman describes as "a category of verbal moods that indicate that certain events have not happened, may never happen, or should or must or are indeed desired to happen, but for which there is no indication that they will ever happen. Irrealis moods are also known as counterfactual moods and include the conditional, the subjunctive, the optative, and the imperative—all best expressed in this book as the might-be and the might-have-been."
Also in the conversation is a deep look at time in music, the melancholy of Mozart, the wanderings of Freud and Cavafy, and a special reading of Proust by Aciman at the end, which provides a moving context and final note.
André Aciman received his Ph. D. and A.M. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and a B.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Lehman College. Before coming to The Graduate Center at CUNY, he taught at Princeton University and Bard College.
Although his specialty is in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English, French and Italian literature (he wrote his dissertation on Madame de LaFayette's La Princesse de Clèves), he is especially interested in the theory of the psychological novel (roman d'analyse) across boundaries and eras. In addition to teaching the history of literary theory, he teaches the work of Marcel Proust and the literature of memory and exile. André Aciman is the former executive officer of the Doctoral Program in Comparative Literature. He is also the director of The Writers' Institute at The Graduate Center, as well as of The Center for the Humanities, and of the Critical Theory Certificate Program.
He is the author of the memoir Out of Egypt, and of two collections of essays, False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory and Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere. He has co–authored and edited The Proust Project and Letters of Transit. He is also the author of four novels, Call Me by Your Name, Eight White Nights, Harvard Square, and of the forthcoming Enigma Variations. His books have appeared in many languages. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fellowship from The New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Paris Review, as well as in many volumes of The Best American Essays.
