Let's Talk About It
A new 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 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)
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
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)
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
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
What is going to sea really like? We'll learn about it from a variety of viewpoints and genres.
"The Seafarer" 10th-century poem
"Youth" by Joseph Conrad
Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling
"Dauber" by John Masefield
The Log of the Skipper's Wife by James Balano
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
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.
Explore Cuban culture and history through the voices of talented Cuban authors. The writing in this series is lyrical, compelling, and poetic.
Biography of a Runaway Slave (Esteban Montejo) by Miguel Barnet
Montejo (1860-1973) was born a slave on a sugar plantation, escaped, and went on to live an extraordinary life. Honest, blunt, compassionate, and engaging, his voice provides an extraordinary insight into the African culture that took root in the Caribbean. One of the few accounts that exist of Latin American slavery from a slave’s point of view.
In the Cold of the Malecon & Other Stories by Antonio Jose Ponte
Riveting stories set in Cuba following the collapse of the Soviet Union, when people lived uncertain of what the future held for them. While living in this state of suspension, Ponte's dynamic characters create their own startling worlds.
The Chase by Alejo Carpentier
A thrilling tale written in 1958 by one of Cuba’s most important intellectuals. " In a nameless, Havana-like city, an anonymous man flees a team of shadowy, relentless political assassins, and ultimately takes refuge in a symphony auditorium during a performance of Beethoven’s Eroica . . . This nightmarish novel does not so much tell a story as map the secret political infrastructure of cities, governments, churches, music, and bodies." (The Independent) The New York Times called The Chase “A masterpiece."
Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia
A story of a Cuban family at home and in exile in the 1970s and 1980s. This novel captures the hard lives of those in Cuba and of those dedicated to the revolution, yet also presents the vivid picture of those who have left Cuba and carry a profound bitterness against the revolution and must define their identity as Cubans. The New York Times Review said Dreaming in Cuban "is beautifully written in language that is by turns languid and sensual, curt and suprising...a jewel of a first novel." And we agree! It is full of color and poetry. Not to be missed!
Paradiso by Jose Lezama Lima
Hailed as one of the great masterpieces of modern literature and written by one of Cuba’s foremost poets, Paradiso is the story of Jose Cemi, who in the wake of his father’s premature death comes of age in turn-of-the-century Cuba.
Benjamin Franklin by Edward S. Morgan
“The best short biography of Franklin ever written...[a] concise and beautifully written portrait." Gordon Wood, New York Times Review of Books
Women of the Republic by Linda Kerber
A groundbreaking analysis of the role of women during the Revolutionary Era- their participation in the war, social and political status, and the development of the ideology of "Republican motherhood," which urged women to direct their patriotism toward the nurturing of the next generation of public-spirited citizens.
Setting the World Ablaze: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and the American Revolution by John Ferling
“An interesting case study of the factors that enable a few remarkable men to ride the tide of history and, ultimately, to shape it." - review, American History
The Minutemen and their World by Robert Gross
A detailed reconstruction of the lives and community of Concord, Massachusetts, where the Revolution began in 1775. A compelling interpretation of the American Revolution as a social movement.
The American Revolution: A History by Gordon S. Wood
A synthesis of the events of the American Revolution by a leading scholar on the subject.
This series uses a lively selection of readings to approach a central and sometimes thorny issue in American society: philanthropy. Giving, be it of time or treasure, has played a significant role in the development of the United States and its unique network of charitable and voluntary organizations. Yet questions of wealth, generosity and money are almost guaranteed to provoke discomfort, as charity has always been a deeply personal and private matter.
Why do people give? Why do certain people give to certain causes but not to others? How do you know if your giving is doing any good? These are the sorts of provocative questions to be considered in Thoughtful Giving: Philanthropy as Civic Engagement. Readings are drawn from a new anthology edited by Amy Kass entitled The Perfect Gift: the Philanthropic Imagination in Poetry and Prose and include short selections by wonderful writers and thinkers such as Edith Wharton, O. Henry, Sarah Orne Jewett, Rabindranath Tagore, C.S. Lewis, Aristotle, P.G. Wodehouse, George Eliot, Jane Addams, Rudyard Kipling, John O’Hara, His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama, Woodrow Wilson, Shakespeare, Andrew Carnegie, and others.
This special series is supported by Thoughtful Giving: Philanthropy As Civic Engagement, a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The viewpoints of people on the inside and the outside of communities depicted in these writings - whether in a small Maine town, a prison, Dublin, Newfoundland, Nigeria, or plague-stricken England - can contribute to our understanding of what is fundamental to our nature as human beings.
What are the benefits and costs of being part of a community, and what is the role of individual expression? The tension between the inner pressure of defining and expressing our individuality and the need to be accepted by the social world is a force that shapes the choices we make. How do we respond to that tension? What is required to sustain a community, and what causes communities to split apart? to heal?
Choice I:To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Voted best novel of the century by librarians across the country, Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel explores "with rich humor and unswerving honesty the irrationality of adult attitudes toward race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s through the eyes of two children. The conscience of a town, steeped in prejudice, violence and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina and quiet heroism of one man’s struggle for justice for a black man wrongly accused of a horrible crime- but the weight of history will only tolerate so much." (from the 40th Anniversary Edition of the book).
Empire Falls by Richard Russo
A Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Maine author Richard Russo. Empire Falls is set in a dying Maine mill town and depicts blue-collar life, which itself increasingly resembles a kind of high-wire act performed without the benefit of any middle-class safety nets. A novel filled with humor, insight, and grace, the Christian Science Monitor called this one of the " last great novels of the 20th century."
The Commitments by Roddy Doyle
"Dublin soul" is what the lads call it. Obsessed with James Brown, Percy Sledge and other rhythm-and-blues greats from across the ocean, young Jimmy Rabbitte organizes the "world’s hardest working band," made up of fellow Dubliners, and sets out to teach the town a lesson about soul. This cheeky first novel by a Dublin native, punctuated with Irish obscenities and quotes from soul classics, informed by righteous working-class anger and youthful alienation, offers the entertaining and insightful chronicle of The Commitment’s rise and inevitable fall. In the process, impromptu sermons on the true meaning of soul are delivered in delightfully offhand fashion ("soul is lifting yourself up, soul is dusting yourself off"). (Publishers Weekly)
The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
The Pulitzer Prize winning story of Quoyle, a third-rate newspaperman, who is wrenched violently out of his workaday life by the death of his estranged wife. He retreats with his daughters to his ancestral home on the starkly beautiful Newfoundland coast, where a rich cast of local characters all play a part in Quoyle’s struggle to reclaim his life. As three generations of his family cobble up new lives, Quoyle confronts his private demons- and the unpredictable forces of nature and society- and begins to see the possibility of love. A vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary American family." Annie Proulx is one of the most gifted and original writers in America today. (Book description)
Climbing the God Tree: A Novel in Stories by Jaimee Wriston Colbert
Colbert won the Willa Cather Fiction Prize for this novel set in Maine. "Jaimee Wriston Colbert looks deeply into the ragged places of our psyches and reveals our humanity in all its beauty and imperfection. Here is a writer who, in powerfully linked stories, movingly evokes both our craving for the sacred and out tenacious embrace of the profane." (Dawn Raffel, from book description).
Choice II:Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing edited by Bell Gale Chevigny
“Doing time." For the prison writers whose work is included in this anthology, it means more than serving a sentence; it means staying alive and sane, preserving dignity, reinventing oneself, and somehow retaining one’s humanity. For the last quarter century the prestigious writers’ organization PEN has sponsored a contest for writers behind bars to help prisoners face these challenges... These are the best of the submissions." (Book description)
“In a time when the nation wants less than ever to hear these voices, this book says to all readers, we are one...There is a groping authenticity of language here that encourages us to think again about prison life." New York Times Book Review
Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks
A fictionalized account of the suffering of an English village that quarantined itself n 1666 when struck by the plague. But as death reaches every household, the community begins to disintegrate even as Anna, the main character, begins to see this as a year of wonders. “Vivid in its humanity, immediate in its narrative, it confirms in compelling terms the universal vulnerability of humankind, and the wonder of survival." Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler’s List.
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
A woman is rejected by her Puritan community for her non-conformity in this classic novel. “With The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne became the first American novelist to forge from our Puritan heritage a universal classic, a masterful exploration of humanity’s unending struggle with sin, guilt and pride." (from then publisher)
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
A group of English schoolboys are stranded on a remote island and form their own community with rules of conduct to survive, The structure of their civilization deteriorates, however, as the group splits into two factions and a darker side of human nature is revealed. "It is not only a first -rate adventure story but a parable of our times." Time and Tide. “This brilliant work is a frightening parody on man’s return . . . to that state of darkness from which it took him thousands of years to emerge . . . Superbly written." --The New York Times
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
This novel ha been translated in over fifty different languages. Chinua Achebe’s masterpiece often compared to the great Greek tragedies. A classic novel about the confrontation of African tribal life with colonial rule tells the tragic story of a warrior whose manly, fearless exterior conceals bewilderment, fear, and anger at the breakdown of his society.
“Chinua Achebe is gloriously gifted with the magic of an ebullient, generous, great talent." Nadine Gordimer
