The Swarthmore Book Group is primarily composed of Swarthmore alumni and
parents of Swarthmore students, but welcomes anyone who would like to
join. There are roughly 300 people in the D.C./Baltimore area on its
email list, although not all take part in the book discussions.
Discussion groups meet more or less monthly all over the area, including
one section that meets on the third Monday of the month at Politics
& Prose. The group gets together as a whole only once a year, when
the professor comes to DC to talk at Politics & Prose.
Our group takes a hiatus in the summer, but I'm thrilled to announce that Swarthmore English
professor Rachel Sagner Buurma will be our book group's mentor when we resume in Fall 2012. One
of Prof. Buurma specialities is Victorian literature and culture, and she has
already put together an intriguing Victorian reading list for us. She'll be
coming to DC in the fall for an introductory talk on Sunday, October 7, at 1 p.m. at P&P.
Read about Professor Buurma here: http://www.swarthmore.edu/academics/english-literature/faculty-and-staff/rachel-buurma-x20224.xml
.
Prof. Buurma writes:
"This set of six novels invites us to explore the
dangers and pleasures of reading, writing, print publication, information
circulation, and the research process as some major Victorian novelists
imagined them. Just as today new digital mediums seem to some to be changing
many of our familiar ways of life, so too in the nineteenth century did the
advent of mechanized, mass-produced print - a phenomenon which made all kinds
of writing (especially newspapers and novels) accessible as never before - seem
to both threaten and promise real social and cultural change. Through their
representations of reading, writing, editing, publication, journalism, and -
especially - novel reading and writing, these six novels comment on the
culture-shaping phenomenon of which they were themselves an essential part.
Larger questions of democracy, high culture and low culture, and social mobility,
not to mention aesthetic form and moral value were for the Victorians - as they
are for us today - are bound up with these apparently more minor questions
concerning publication and information technology."
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For further information or to be placed on the group's email list,
contact Pamela Zurer at pam@zurer.com.
