David L. Kubal Memorial Lecture Series
David L. Kubal (1936-1982) was raised in Chicago, attended Marmion Military Academy, and received his B.A. in English from the University of Notre Dame. He studied at Northwestern University and returned to his alma mater for a Ph.D. After teaching at Michigan State University, he came to Cal State L.A. in 1968, where he taught until his untimely death in January 1982.
In 1972, Prof. Kubal published Outside the Whale: George Orwell's Art and Politics. He then devoted himself to our graduate program in English, and from his efforts to strengthen and formalize the postgraduate teaching of literature he was inspired to read and think with increasing depth and breadth in the entire Western literary tradition. This resulted in his teaching a series of seminars on the nineteenth-century novel and Victorian culture, and in his publishing articles in journals such as The Yale Review and The Kenyon Review. The thought and writing of these years culminated in The Consoling Intelligence: Responses to Literary Modernism, a collection of essays published posthumously in 1982.
In his teaching, in his scholarship, in his friendships with students and colleagues, in the daily responsibilities of his professional life, David L. Kubal embodied the highest academic ideas. In January of 1983, Dr. Peter Brier established the annual lecture series as a memorial tribute to his exemplary colleague.
As part of the Kubal Lecture, every year CSULA students are invited to submit essays on a literary or cultural topic. The author of the best essay is awarded the department's David L. Kubal Memorial Essay Prize. Click here for more information about the Kubal Essay contest.
The David L. Kubal Memorial Fund
For contributions, please make checks payable to:
The David L. Kubal Memorial Fund
Cal State LA English Department
5151 State University Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90032-8110
List of Speakers
2017 Timothy Steele, California State University
2016 Fred Moten, University of California, Riverside
2015 James Paul Gee, Arizona State University
2014 Lauren Berlant, University of Chicago
2013 Jose Munoz, New York University
2012 Douglas Mao, Johns Hopkins University
2011 Alan Liu, UC Santa Barbara
2010 Susan Green, The Huntington Library
2009 V. A. Kolve, UCLA
2008 John Brewer, Caltech
2006 Anthony Arthur
2005 Arthur F. Kinney, University of Massachusetts
2004 Estela Alicia Lopez Lomas, author, and Dr. Moira Fradinger, Yale University, translator, Reading and Translation of The Blaze Behind the Mirror (El fuego tras el espejo, 2002)
2003 X. J. Kennedy, "Catastrophe in Daily Life"
2002 Peter Brier, California State University, "Walter Benjamin: Critic or Theorist?"
2001 Gregory Maertz, St. Johns University, "Nazi Art: The Secret Postwar History"
2001 Dick Davis, Ohio State University, "'All my Soul is There': Translation and the Rhetoric of English Poetry"
2000 Maria Herrera-Sobek, University of California, Santa Barbara, "Environment Matters: Ecological Feminist Theory and Chicana Literary and Artistic Expressions"
1999 James Engell, Harvard University, "Coleridge Against Slavery: The Anachronism of 'Liberal' and 'Conservative'"
1998 Emory Elliott, University of California, Riverside, "Aesthetics and Cultural Difference: Our New Professional Challenge"
1997 Adolf Wood, Times Literary Supplement, "A Mirror of the Times: The Times Literary Supplement in the 20th Century"
1996 Helen Vendler, Harvard University, "Shakespeare's Sonnets: Ideas into Forms"
1995 Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University, "A Literary Approach to Cultural Studies"
1994 Frederick Crews, University of California, Berkeley, "The End of the Poststructuralist Era"
1993 Mark Turner, University of Maryland, "The Literary Mind"
1992 Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University, "How it Means: Making Poetic Sense in a Media Society"
1991 Don E. Wayne, University of California, San Diego, "English, Ethnicity and Cultural Exchange"
1990 Geoffrey Hartman, Yale University, "Culture Wars Between the Wars—With an Excursus to the Present"
1989 J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine, "Ideology and Criticism"
1988 Harry Stone, California State University, Northridge, "Dickens and the Supernatural"
1987 Paul M. Zall, California State University, Los Angeles
1986 Ruth Roberts, University of California, Riverside, "Victorians and Moderns: A Unified Field"
1985 Judson Rosengrant, University of Southern California, "The Cultural Dimensions of Translation"
1984 Peter Stansky, Stanford University, "George Orwell: The Man and his Novel"
1983 Norman Fruman, University of Minnesota