Stephen Henighan - Edit 1

- 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.