Let's Talk About It
Refreshing the Whodunit: Moving Beyond Christie and Doyle
Developed by Dr. Karen E. Waldron, College of the Atlantic
Beginning with an introductory talk on the evolution of this genre from its origins with Edgar Allen Poe through classic writers and detectives / inquirers to the present, this Let’s Talk About It series provides new and experienced mystery and detective fans with an opportunity for in depth conversation about how this fiction has incorporated the contemporary world’s globalism; dilemmas of race, gender, ethnicity and class; religious conflict; historical revision; and others. To refresh the whodunit, participants will read from a selection of novels by writers more marginal and contemporary than Doyle and Christie—though in some cases playing off of the classics—and ponder questions of the mystery’s relationship to history and culture. Does the mystery merely reflect its cultural environment or does it help to elucidate or even change that same environment? What do contemporary mysteries bring today’s readers that we really need, though we may not have known we need it? How much social change can a formulaic plot generate or reflect? The series will provide participants with the immense joy of reading and talking together about this popular but sophisticated and very modern genre.
The readings include:
Dance Hall of the Dead by Tony Hillerman: Tony Hillerman, now a household world, leapt on the mystery scene with his depiction of Navajo culture in The Blessing Way and admirable characterization of Navajo policeman Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn. Dance Hall of the Dead is another of his early works, this time featuring both Navajo and Zuni culture.
The Skull Mantra by Eliot Pattison: The Skull Mantra shot on the literary scene as the first novel featuring the captured Chinese detective Shan, imprisoned in Tibetan labor camps by the Chinese police. At the camps Shan finds himself supported by ancient Tibetan lamas, also miserably imprisoned.
A Cold Day for Murder by Dana Stabenow: Set in Alaska, this novel features Kate Shugak, a tough modern female sleuth who is unashamed of her physical strength, relatively fearless, and keeps company with a wolf-hound named Mutt in her isolated cabin.
Murder at the Nightwood Bar by Katherine V. Forrest: The best text by the most widely-read author of the wildly expanding genre of lesbian and gay detective fiction. Amateur City (1984) was the first Kate Delafield mystery, introducing a smart, modern lesbian detective dedicated to police work but also attempting to deal with her sexuality on the force.
Inspector Morimoto and the Japanese Cranes: A Detective Story Set in Japan by Timothy Hemion: Hemion has generated an intriguing series featuring Inspector Morimoto and his female equal, Detective Suzuki. Set in contemporary Japan, Hemion (a mathematician) portrays Japanese culture not only in setting and character, but also in his precise mode of reasoning.
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie King: (Alternate Text: may replace one of the above.) A longer but marvelous novel that has become a classic in its fresh approach to Sherlock Holmes, this text should be a reference point for the series but will probably have been read by many participants. As a result, it is presented as an alternate, to be used when readers are not familiar with the text and discussed as part of the contextual matter when they are.
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today?
Developed by David Richards, Historian and Assistant Director of the Margaret Chase Smith Library
This series will examine one the most pivotal yet most neglected eras of United States history, one that began to define the parameters of the modern world in which we live. Rising out of the carnage of four years of civil war and a failed attempt both to reconstruct the South and reconcile race relations, Americans turned their attention during the last quarter of the nineteenth century from political debates over the nature of the nation and moral considerations of civil rights to economic projects of physical expansion and material wealth. The people of principle—of states rights versus federal union, of popular sovereignty versus free soil, of slave power versus abolition—became the people of progress—of railroad building, corporate trusts, street-car suburbs, and social and geographic mobility. In addition to industrialization, urbanization, and migration, the modernization of the United States brought with it the rise of a leisure class and a new therapeutic consumer culture.
The readings include:
The Devil and the White City by Erik Larson juxtaposes the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 against a series of mysterious disappearances and salacious murders that took place in the Windy City around the same time.
The Gilded Age, by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner helped define the era. The authors shared writing responsibilities for a sprawling novel that intertwines several story lines, bound together by two main themes—romance and speculation, love and money, each of which can lead to ruin.
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton won a Pulitzer Prize. It looks at New York high society during the 1870s focusing on the entrenched, but beset, ruling commercial elite of the Gilded Age.
The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells examines the career of one of the noueau riche, a member of the rising commercial middle class that challenged the social elite.
Poland Spring: A Tale of the Gilded Age by David Richards is a cultural study that traces the transformation of a tired family farmstead in Maine into a prosperous Victorian resort during the last half of the nineteenth century.
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.
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.
Behind the Headlines: An Introduction to the Middle East
A Special Let’s Talk About It Series Begun in May 2006
This is a special Let’s Talk About It program that we have developed in response to many requests we have received for a series focusing on the Middle East. Mahmud Faksh, a professor of political science and an expert on the Middle East at the University of Southern Maine, has developed this new Let’s Talk About It series and will lead some of the discussions.
The format will be a little different from our normal Let’s Talk About It programs. Groups will meet 3 times with a facilitator/scholar who specializes in the Middle East. The readings for both sessions will be from The Contemporary Middle East, edited by Karl Yambert, a new, accessible anthology of writings by leading scholars incorporating historical, fcultural, and political perspectives of the region.
More information is available here and you can download the word document (52K) for Behind the Headlines: An Introduction to the Middle East
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)
Across Cultures & Continents: Literature of the South Asian Experience
A new series developed for MHC by Professor Deepaka 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
Defining Wilderness: Defining Maine
This new series, developed for MHC by historian Candace Kanes, examines the Maine wilderness, how various people have experienced it and written about it, and how those accounts have influenced Maine and shaped its identity. It raises questions about what constitutes wilderness, the relationship between humans and the natural environment, about conservation and ecology, and not least about our personal relationship to the wilderness.
Readings will range from intensely personal to historical. The series begins with Thoreau’s The Maine Woods, first published in 1864, two years after the death of the writer, philosopher, and naturalist from Concord, Massachusetts. The Maine Woods will be paired with an account by Elizabeth Oakes Smith of her 1849 trip to Katahdin. Oakes Smith, a native of Yarmouth, and a noted writer and lecturer, was reportedly the first woman to scale Maine’s tallest peak.
READINGS:
Dean Bennett’s The Wilderness from Chamberlain Farm: A Story of Hope for the American Wild is a historical account of the area around a late 19th century farm. Bennett, a retired University of Maine at Farmington professor of history, has written a history of the wilderness area where the farm was located from its geologic beginnings, through its use by native peoples, as a logging supply point, and finally as a recreation site. The book explores the meaning of wilderness, how it has been interpreted by various people, and the changes on the landscape brought about by those interpretations.
Next in the series is Fly Rod Crosby: the Woman Who Marketed Maine, by Julia A. Hunter and Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr., a short, photo-filled biography of Cornelia “Fly Rod” Crosby of Phillips, Maine. Fly Rod worked for Maine Central Railroad and helped encourage tourism in the Maine woods in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This session will also include several short accounts by early tourists of their trips to the Maine woods: “Down the Allagash,” about a 1911 canoe trip from Greenville to Fort Kent, written by Henry L. Withee of Rockport; and an 1889 logbook of a hunting-fishing trip to Ragged Lake by John Dunn of St. Paul, Minnesota. Both also are part of Maine Memory Network and can be accessed online, along with numerous photos of both trips.
George S. Kephart came to Maine after World War I, and worked as a forester for eleven years. Campfires Rekindled is his memoir of logging in Maine in those years. It is full of anecdotes, humorous and painful, and information about “modern” logging practices.
The last reading will be We Took to The Woods by Louise Dickinson Rich. This is a classic memoir of life in a remote outpost near Lower Richardson Lake in the 1930’s. Louise, her “husband” Ralph, their young son, Rufus, and sometimes, his daughter Sally, along with various dogs and cats occupy Forest Lodge, where they sustain themselves by fishing, maple sugaring, gathering berries, hauling tourists’ canoes and gear, and doing other odd jobs.
