Let’s Talk About It : Newest Series
Growing Up Between Cultures
A series developed by Kathleen Ashley, University of Southern Maine.
Issues of cultural, ethnic or national identity—once considered relatively simple and unproblematic— move to the foreground in this reading series that includes memoirs, a novel, and essays. Each book provides a window into a historical period and specific geographical locations where different cultures intersect. Whether the setting is colonial and post-colonial Africa, the American Southwest in the 1940’s and 1950’s, post-World War II Poland, the intellectual scene of New York City, the class conscious Caribbean, or political Washington D.C., the complexity of cultural history in each case challenges the youthful protagonist who searches for a stable and coherent identity.
All of the central characters wrestle with questions about their own individual identity, questions complicated by their experiences growing up among multiple cultures. Who am I? What culture do I belong to? What country am I “at home” in? What language do I speak, and how do I communicate with people around me who speak another language or whose social codes differ from those I understand? How do others classify me? What bridge between my past and my future can I establish in the present? The story of the search for self-definition often includes the stories of parents, whose cultural assumptions and identifications may differ from those of the next generation and yet who have a powerful influence on their children. There may be multiple cultures within the family as well as in the outside society.
As a group, the readings ask us to examine such concepts as race, ethnicity, culture or nationality, and to challenge common definitions that may be based in political expedience rather than fact. Each author, however, chooses a different path for his or her journey toward awareness.
The readings include:
- Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller
- The Names: A Memoir by N. Scott Momaday
- Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language by Eva Hoffman
- Anna In-Between by Elizabeth Nunez
- The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker by Eric Liu
Making Sense of the Civil War (Coming in January, 2012)
This new series is designed as a succession of five conversations exploring different facets of the Civil War experience, informed by reading the words written or spoken by powerful voices from the past and present. Each session will explore a different topic.
“Making Sense of the American Civil War” was created and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities as part of its We the People initiative, which promotes scholarship, teaching, and learning about American history and culture.
- March by Geraldine Brooks [2005]
- Selections from America’s War anthology
- Selections from America’s War: Talking About the Civil War and Emancipation on their 150th Anniversaries, a new anthology edited by Edward L. Ayers and published by NEH and ALA
- Selections from America’s War anthology
- Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam by James M. McPherson
- Selections from America’s War anthology
- Selections from America’s War anthology
PLEASE NOTE: Due to special funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, libraries awarded this program will host 5 sessions.
Invisible New England: The Real New England?
Developed by Victoria Bonebakker, Maine Humanities Council
The words “New England” often conjure up an image of neat houses clustered picturesquely around a village green. Its inhabitants, in keeping with its name, are of Anglo-Saxon stock. Taciturn, frugal, and hardworking, the typical Yankee is thought to have a staunch character molded by tilling a hard and rocky soil or battling an uncertain sea.
This traditional view of New England and New Englanders includes much that is factual—aspects of it can be seen by anyone who lives or travels in the region today. But what this picture leaves out is perhaps even more revealing than what it includes. The novels and memoir that make up this series take us into this more complicated and richer reality, and offer parts of the story that are often missing from the narrative of the New England created by Hawthorne, Melville, Alcott, Jewett, White, or Frost. This series brings us accounts of Catholic immigrants—Irish, Italian, and French Canadian—of transplanted black Southerners, and of Mainers scrambling to put together a living in a poor coastal community, that is neither harmonious nor ordered, and where a traditional way of life is challenged by a seemingly hostile world.
The readings include:
The Living is Easy, by Dorothy West, is about the life of a middle class black family in Boston, inspired by West's own experiences and her observations about social class in the black community in the early 20th century.
Like Lesser Gods, by Mari Tomasi, is a novel about a community of Italian immigrant stonecutters living in a small Vermont town during the 1920s.
The Family, by David Plante, is an autobiographical novel about a Francophone family in a French-Canadian enclave of Providence, Rhode Island in the 1950s.
All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, by Michael Patrick MacDonald. This memoir takes us into the projects of South Boston in the 1970s and 1980s, where poverty, drugs and violence besiege a predominantly Irish Catholic community.
The Wooden Nickel, by William Carpenter, is a novel about the struggles of a contemporary Maine lobsterman to survive in a world he no longer understands.
Liberating Imaginations: Readings in Modern Irish Fiction
Developed by Greg Winston, Husson University
From the growing pains of de-colonization and independence, through the insular conservatism of mid-century, to the recent roaring prosperity of the so-called Celtic Tiger, Irish writers have, as Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus describes, forged the “uncreated conscience” of Ireland. This series invites readers to consider how five of those writers have imagined their nation for readers at home and around the world. The novels and stories included in this series have helped Irish literature achieve worldwide prominence, entertaining and informing readers with the power moving potency of good storytelling, and at the same time, re-defined Irishness by unabashedly confronting such complex issues as gender, religion, sexuality, family, and class identity.
The readings include:
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, published in 1916, the year the Easter Rising initiated Ireland’s war for independence, represents Joyce’s own manifesto of intellectual and artistic liberation.
The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien, brought Edna O’Brien early literary success and international acclaim; it also gave her much notoriety in Ireland when it was banned by the Catholic censorship board for its bold treatment of sexual and religious themes.
The Collected Stories by John McGahern most of these masterful stories are set during the author’s upbringing in the 1940s and 50s, in the conservative, agrarian Ireland of the de Valera years.
Antarctica by Claire Keegan this debut collection from one of Ireland’s most exciting new fiction writers received the prestigious Rooney Prize for Irish literature in 2000.
A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle bringing the series full circle to 1916, A Star Called Henry takes a gritty look at the Easter Rising and subsequent War of Independence through the upbringing of its title character, Henry Starr, a boy who seems part mythic hero, part self-inspired tall tale.
Paradise Revealed: Readings In Caribbean Literature
Developed by Erika J. Waters, Ph.D.
This series examines the literature of the Caribbean archipelago, from the Lesser Antilles to the Greater Antilles, from Trinidad to Jamaica. Using a variety of genres (short fiction, the novel, non-fiction, and drama), the series considers the issues that have shaped the islands and still affect them today: colonialism, island rivalries, political independence, the legacy of slavery, gender roles, and economic exploitation. The selected works emphasize the uniqueness of the individual islands as well as the powerful and innovative talents of Caribbean writers.
The readings include:
The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories by Stewart Brown and John Wickham, ed. Oxford University Press. (Selected short stories).
Wide Sargasso Sea (Dominica) by Jean Rhys. Offended by Charlotte Bronte’s reference to Mrs. Rochester as a “Creole lunatic in the attic” in Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys, herself a Creole from Dominica (a person of European heritage born in the Caribbean), determined to explain how Mrs. Rochester came to be in the attic.
Another Life (St. Lucia) by Derek Walcott. This book-long poetic account of the Nobel Prize winner’s early life is a highly evocative record of his life after his father’s early death.
A Small Place (Antigua) by Jamaica Kincaid. Kincaid talks about her homeland of Antigua, the colonial and post-colonial relationship with England, and along the way, touches on most of the important concerns of the contemporary Caribbean.
Caribbean Passion (Jamaica) by Opal Palmer Adisa. This is a collection of poems, written in both standard English and Jamaican patois, from an accomplished novelist, poet and storyteller.
Krik? Krak! (Haiti) by Edwidge Danticat. This is a collection of short stories from a young Haitian writer whose subsequent first novel was an Oprah Book Club selection.
