Let’s Talk About It : Best Kept Secrets
Across Cultures & Continents: Literature of the South Asian Experience
A series developed for MHC by Professor Deepika Marya of the University of Southern Maine.
One legacy of India's colonial past is fiction about the colonial experience, from the perspective of both the colonizer and the colonized. From the mid-nineteenth century at least until India’s independence from Great Britain in 1947, the relationship between India and Britain was marked by mistrust, conflict and racism. Early English writers about India — Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster, and Joseph Conrad, to mention the most prominent — wrote for the British, whether in the colonies or at home, and represented the colonies without explicitly acknowledging the exploitative nature of the political structure.
When India became independent in 1947, most Britons returned to their home country, which soon afterwards opened its doors to its former colonial subjects, many of whom came to work in the textile industry. After several decades, Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis from the former colony found themselves part of and shaped by two cultures — that of their homelands and that of metropolitan Britain. The customary divisions of race, language and culture were no longer absolute. Later in the century many Indians immigrated to the United States, either directly from India or via Britain. This series will explore the phenomenon of writing across these cultures and continents.
The series will begin with a classic from the colonial era, A Passage to India by E.M. Forster (1924) before moving to post-colonial works such as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981, winner of the Booker Prize), a sobering account of the sub-continent’s history through characters who were born on the day of India’s independence, and Monica Ali’s Bricklane (2002, short listed for a Booker Prize), which weaves together the histories of Bangladesh/ India and England. The last two books are Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine (1989, A New York Times Notable Book) and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize winning collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), both set in the United States. Indian immigration into the U.S. is a relatively recent phenomenon, but contemporary South Asian literature set here tells the “old” story of immigrants constructing a sense of belonging in an alien culture.
At the center of all the books is an exploration of what the South Asian/Indian experience has been, both living away from home in the U.K. and the U.S.A. and under colonialism.
BOOKS:
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Bricklane by Monica Ali
Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
American Traditions/American Innovations: American Poetry of the Second Half of the Twentieth Century
We are pleased to offer a new poetry series developed by former Maine Poet Laureate Baron Wormser in response to many requests for a follow up to our popular After Frost series!
American Traditions/ American Innovations: American Poetry of the Second Half of the Twentieth Century, explores the depth and range of contemporary American poetry and what makes it uniquely “American.” The series begins by looking at the roots of American poetry through three nineteenth century American poets who stand for strong tendencies, concerns, attitudes, aesthetic outlooks, and passions that have come to mark latterday American poetry as distinctly American — Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Using a basic understanding of the works of these poets as a springboard for discussion, the groups then explore together works by contemporary American poets who have followed some of the proclivities displayed in the work of Whitman, Dickinson, and Longfellow such as Allen Ginsberg, Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, Robert Creeley, Sylvia Plath, Howard Moss and Richard Wilbur (among others). There will be an opportunity at the last session for participants to bring in poems by poets not represented in the anthology selected for the series to share and discuss.
This is a great series for poetry lovers and those new to poetry!
BOOKS:
Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry (J.D. McClatchy, editor)
Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (Penguin Classics)
Crossing Over: Works by Contemporary American Indian Writers
In these works, American Indian writers blend western writing techniques with oral tradition to mediate between two cultures. Libraries can select 5 titles.
Fools Crow by James Welch
Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
Tracks by Louise Erdrich
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie, and the film Smoke Signals
The Sharpest Sight by Louis Owens
Song of Rita Joe: Autobiography of a Mi'Kmaq Poet by Rita Joe, Lynn Henry
Family and Self: Readings in Twentieth Century Japanese Fiction
Developed by Sarah M. Strong, Associate Professor of Japanese Language and Literature, Bates College.
The family is an important social unit in any society. In Japan, with its strong legacy of Confucian values and traditional emphasis of group over the individual, the family plays an exceptionally important role.
The traditional Japanese family, called the ie, experienced significant transformations and challenges during the tumultuous years of the twentieth century. Growth of industry, salaried jobs and the movements of rural populations to industrial centers put strain on the notion of the family as a unit of production. The importation of Western ideas such as individualism that placed primary value on the self over more collective identities, as well as the notion of “love marriage” that called for matches to be determined not by the ie but by the couple involved, further undermined the authority of the family structure. Legal reforms, especially in the immediate post-war period, additionally challenged the ie by dissolving the system of primogeniture and treating each nuclear family as a unit rather than a genealogical line.
How do Japanese novelists depict the family with its potential to both define and bind its members? Do they portray it as a nurturing institution offering the strength of mutual support to all, or as a hierarchal unit that serves the interests of its most privileged members? How do they chronicle the ie's changes over time? Is the family they depict different in ways we can define from a family in the West? What happens to the individual who finds him or herself outside of the family unit? How do modern-day novelists see the family faring in today’s consumer society?
This series explores five novels—two authored by women and three by men—each engaged with issues of both family and self, but from widely differing perspectives.
BOOKS:
The Waiting Years by Enchi Fumiko.
The Makioka Sisters by Tanizaki Junichirô.
The Setting Sun by Dazai Osamu.
A Personal Matter by Nobel laureate Ôe Kenzaburô.
Good-bye Tsugumi by Yoshimoto Banana.
More Information - Word Doc (87Kb)
Entering Nature: Contemporary Views of the Human Self in the Natural World
Contemporary writings that address in interesting and distinctive ways the affinities that unite and the distances that separate the human and the non-human.
The Tree by John Fowles
Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez
Exploring Human Boundaries: Literary Perspectives on Health Care Providers and Their Patients
A disease or a sick person? Health care professionals do not always focus on what is most important to the patient and the patient's family. These classic 20th-century accounts of illness, death, and dying dramatically illuminate these complex issues.
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Plague by Albert Camus
The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby
W;t by Margaret Edson
Making a Difference: How Love And Duty Change Lives
A Special Let’s Talk About It Series
Developed by Margery Irvine, writer and lecturer at the University of Maine.
What happens when we are called to act upon what we perceive as our duty, especially when such action entails considerable sacrifice? We may be family members caring for partners, children, aging parents and siblings; we live in communities, cities, a nation; we are graduates, professionals, workers; we have both vocations and avocations; and we are, like it or not, members of the human race. Confronted with questions of duty, responsibility, service, we choose how best to demonstrate our humanity.
The books in this series illustrate how different people—both real and imaginary—have demonstrated compassion in difficult situations. Each has found himself or herself expected to serve, in some capacity, a group either small or large, ranging from one other person to multitudes. Each has felt called to “make a difference”—and although each has tried, not all have succeeded.
More information is available here and you can download the word document (52K) for Making a Difference: How Love and Duty Change Lives.
This special series is supported by Thoughtful Giving: Philanthropy As Civic Engagement, a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
