The UNESCO Chair for Dialogue, in cooperation with the Philosophy Department of the Faculty of Arts-University of Kufa, hosted the expatriate Iraqi writer, researcher, and translator Professor Said Al-Ghanmi at an interactive Symposiumon Wednesday morning, October 19, 2022, at the Faculty of Arts. Professor Saeed Al-Ghanimi gave a lecture entitled “Literature and symbolic value-making”. The lecturer talked about how literature, philosophy, and human values have been linked since the beginning of written history. The lecture debated the values of heroism, salvation, and other examples that reveal the role of literature in the transformation of values in societies. These values were first exposed through epics and legends as the first forms of the literary narrative to modern and contemporary forms of tales, stories, and novels. The concept of personality in contemporary literature has been transformed into the weak, poor, and marginalized personality that holds the championship. In the lecturer’s opinion, these moral shifts were the result before they were the cause of the transformations of values in societies. It’s the result of a long fight for openness and acceptance of talking to each other. At the end of the symposium, the Dean of the Faculty of Arts presented a letter of thanks and appreciation to the lecturer. The Director of the UNESCO Chair, Dr. Alaa Shatnan, gave Professor Said Al-Ghanmi a shield as a thank-you on behalf of the UNESCO Chair for Dialogue.

Translated into English by Shaima Adnan.

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