President Barack Obama awarded Roberto González Echevarría a 2010 National Humanities Medal at the White House yesterday. Echevarría is the Sterling Professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literature at Yale University.
Meryl Streep, a Yale School of Drama graduate, and former Yale School of Drama dean and Yale Repertory Theatre founder Robert Brustein were among the 2010 National Medal of Arts recipients, though Streep was not at the ceremony.
Echevarría, who earned his Ph.D. from Yale in 1970, received the award “for his contributions to Spanish and Latin American literacy — literary criticism. His path-breaking Myth and Archive: a Theory of Latin American Narrative is among the widely cited scholarly works in Hispanic literature,” according to a White House transcript of yesterday’s ceremony.
In his remarks, Obama said, in part, “The fact is that works of art, literature, works of history, they speak to our condition and they affirm our desire for something more and something better.”