WestConn history professor to discuss writing history in the shadow of a literary master
DANBURY, CONN. — Sometimes it takes more than facts and figures to make history come alive — and that’s just what Dr. Joshua Rosenthal, an assistant professor of history and non-western cultures at Western Connecticut State University, didn’t want to admit.
At 3 p.m. on Wednesday, March 5, Rosenthal will discuss “Writing History in the Shadow of Marquez,” in the Student Center Theater on the university’s Midtown campus, 181 White St. in Danbury.
In a 45-minute discussion, Rosenthal will share his feelings about reading the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the challenges of researching the place and time that the Nobel Prize winner has used as the basis of his fiction. Marquez’s works include “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” a novel that spans one century of a family’s struggles in a Colombian town. The fictional account is based on towns where Marquez spent his childhood. Rosenthal asserts that Marquez is the greatest novelist of the 20th century and is the world’s greatest living novelist.
“I love ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude,’” said Rosenthal, who first read the book when he was 20. “I’ve read it many times over the years.”
But Rosenthal concedes, as a historian of Latin America who studies Colombia’s past, he struggles with his love of the literary work and his passion for history. After reading “One Hundred Years” over and over across the years, Rosenthal realized that the two can, and do, cross paths.
“I would realize the book was more true than I knew,” he said. “It’s literary genre, but the ‘fantastic’ turned factual.”
Rosenthal said he tries not to refer to Marquez in his work because to do so would reduce the writer’s genius to a historian’s clichés. When possible he prefers to explain Colombian history on its own terms. But after his last round of research Rosenthal said: “I just found it’s harder and harder. The stories I’m reading about from the 1840s are closer and closer to what Marquez depicted in ‘One Hundred Years.’ His weight and grasp of the deeper currents of this history and his ability to represent Colombian culture are so profound. He paints a more accurate picture.”
Through his discussion, Rosenthal hopes that people will appreciate that the pursuit of knowledge sometimes requires thinking across disciplines. “If I can get people interested in Colombia and in Marquez while pointing out the problems with dividing the pursuit of knowledge into discrete areas, then … let’s just say that is a successful talk and hopefully will prompt an interesting conversation.”
Wednesday’s talk is free and the public is invited. It is sponsored by the WCSU History Society. For more information, call (203) 837-8484.
