Name Edward Mendelson | Role Author | |
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Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, US & Canada Books The Things That Matter: W, Later Auden, Early Auden, Poems, Moral Agents: Eight Twe Similar People W H Auden, Chester Kallman, Michael Seidel, Edward Lear, George II of Great Britain | ||
Towards a Surveillance Society? With Edward Mendelson and Paul Duguid
Edward Mendelson (born 1946) is a professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the literary executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden and the author or editor of several books about Auden's work, including Early Auden (1981) and Later Auden (1999). He is also the author of The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life (2006)., about nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels, and Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers (2015).
Contents
- Towards a Surveillance Society With Edward Mendelson and Paul Duguid
- Why Odysseus was Right About Persons
- Books
- Selected essays
- References
He has edited standard editions of works by W. H. Auden, including Collected Poems (1976; 2nd edn. 1990; 3rd edn., 2007), The English Auden (1977), Selected Poems (1979, 2nd edn., 2007), As I Walked Out One Evening (selected light verse, 1995), and the continuing Complete Works of W. H. Auden (1986– ).
His work on Thomas Pynchon includes Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays (1978) and numerous essays, including "The Sacred, the Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49 (1975; reprinted in the 1978 collection) and "Gravity's Encyclopedia" (in Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon. The latter essay introduced the critical category of "encyclopedic narrative," further elaborated in a later essay, "Encyclopedic Narrative from Dante to Pynchon".
He is the editor of annotated editions of novels by Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and Anthony Trollope. With Michael Seidel he co-edited Homer to Brecht; The European Epic and Dramatic Traditions (1977).
He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and was the first Isabel Dalhousie Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.
Before teaching at Columbia, he was an associate professor of English at Yale University and a visiting associate professor of English at Harvard University. He received a B.A. from the University of Rochester (1966) and a Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University (1969).
Since 1986 he has written about computing, software, and typography and is a contributing editor of PC Magazine.