Stephen Henighan - Edit 1
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- My name is Stephen Henighan,
I am professor of Spanish
and Hispanic Studies in the School
of Languages and Literature,
and I teach courses in Latin
American Literature in the Spanish
and I teach some introductory
Spanish courses as well.
My research is in the area
of literature and other languages.
My primary research area is the
20th century Latin American novel.
I write journalism about Canadian
literature and culture
and I have my own career as a writer
of novels and children stories.
Basically, all I want to do in my life
is read, write and travel.
So my research is a way of thriving
in that environment
of constantly wanting
to be somewhere else
and be wandering around
and discovering things and...
trying to learn the local language.
I'm looking for
something that will explain to me
some of the inner workings
of the novels I've read from that
particular country.
That may happen because
somebody phrases a question to me
in a bizarre way at a bus stop,
it may happen because I suddenly
see a billboard
that illuminates something, it may
happen because of a conversation
late at night in a hotel lobby.
So a lot of times I'm trying to kind of
soak up the ambiance to the extent
that I understand
the way in which that ambiance
is expressed in a novel
and what kind of decisions
have been made
in order to project that ambiance
within a certain
kind of artistic framework.
It's actually a question of people
who are actually very different
from each other getting closer
to each other
and interacting with each other.
So a big part of that is language,
entering into other people's
mental spaces
and there's no better way to do that
than through their art.