My Stanford English Department honors thesis on Milan Kundera (and my electric guitar)

After discovering Milan Kundera's fiction in 1985, I asked the English Department at Stanford whether I could write my BA honors thesis on him. The faculty had to discuss this: nobody had ever asked to write about translated literature before. But I got the okay to do so. My advisors were German Professor Russell Berman and English Professor Gilbert Sorrentino. I even got a grant to write the thesis, which I ended up calling "Structures of Identity in the novels of Milan Kundera". I don't really remember what I said, but I still have a copy – and I still have the electric guitar I bought with part of my grant money! (Andrew Shields, #111words, 17 July 2023)