Current Groups

book group 39: September 30-October 9, 2009 (10 days)

: Joshua Schuster

A contemporary writer is invited to a small New England college to speak on a topic of her choice. She begins with a lecture on how fiction helps us to imagine what it is like to be an animal. The stakes are raised as the invitee questions whether we can ever eat animals again. Then, just by opening this question, we are lead to think about how rights, power, and suffering define what it means to be human.

Noble prize-winning author J.M. Coetzee's "The Lives of Animals" is an intense short story designed to get the reader to question the power of literature to make us share minds and then change minds. In our ten-day course we will discuss everything from the organic food movement to the ecology of raising cattle, the origin of human rights to the way modernist poetry and philosophy can help us know other minds.

Coetzee's "The Lives of Animals" is actually two chapters from a longer novel (Elizabeth Costello) that stand on their own in a special publication from Princeton University Press. This edition begins with an introduction from Penn's president Amy Gutmann, who comments on the role of literature in framing public discourse on politics. The volume also includes short essays by experts in literature, anthropology, and philosophy, who will help us understand the issues today around animal rights.

Joshua Schuster is an assistant professor of English at the University of Western Ontario. He received his Ph.D. from Penn and has long been involved with the Kelly Writers House. He has published essays in Shofar, the Journal of Modern Literature, and is currently working on a book on modernist American poetry and the history of environmentalism.

book group 40: October 12 - November 12, 2009 (one month)

: Val Ross

"Who hides his fool dies speechless," wrote Henri Micheaux. This discussion group will focus on the fool - speechless but never hidden - in three beautiful films: City Lights, directed by Charles Chaplin, La Strada, directed by Frederico Fellini, and Sweet and Lowdown, directed by Woody Allen. Examining the clown and how he, and she, figure in a rich but unexplored cinematic tradition - the comedy of poverty - we will begin, as Fellini noted, with its Adam: Charles Chaplin. Inspired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art's recent Cezanne exhibition, which placed Cezanne's individual works in the context of works by other great artists, our group will explore how these three extraordinary films and directors are in dialogue with each other and, I hope, be a little foolish ourselves along the way.

Valerie Ross is the Director of the Critical Writing Program in the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, and affiliated faculty in the Department of English and Cinema Studies. Her current research focuses on the representation and function of emotions in works of literature and film.

book group 41: November 14- 23, 2009 (ten days)

: Michelle Taransky

In this group we will explore poetry about paintings, including work by Jorie Graham, William Carlos Williams, Robert Hass, Gertrude Stein, Robert Creeley, and John Taggart. We will ask questions without presuming the answers are readymade: what is there for a poet to do with visual art besides describe it? How is the writing of poems like or unlike the painting of a picture? Are there things poetry can do that paint cannot? What are the differences between poet, painter, reader and viewer? How can a poem be looked at and a painting be read? The poet John Yau understands writing about paintings as a connective practice which joins "poetry to the larger place language and things, writing and art, have in our lives, not as separate entities, one to hang on the wall and the other to be kept on a shelf." We'll take this premise as a given and think about other ways writing and visual arts can intersect. Michelle will email a PDF of poems to be discussed.

Michelle Taransky is the Assistant to the Director of Kelly Writers House. Taransky received a BA from The University of Chicago and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her first book, Barn Burned, Then, was selected by Marjorie Welish for the 2008 Omnidawn Poetry Prize. Collaborative work with her father, a visual artist, has appeared in VOLT's Art on Art issue and a chapbook, The Plans Caution was published by QUEUE. She teaches poetry at Temple University.

book group 42: December 12-18, 2009 (seven days)

: Rebecca Bushnell

Two of the greatest writers of 17th century England, John Donne and Ben Jonson were friends and rivals, both rebels and men on the make. Their work embodies the passions and contradictions of their age, when old ideas of the world, religion, society, and the self were exploding, putting (as Donne wrote) "all in doubt." In this 10-day conversation we will read closely three pairs of extraordinary poems by Donne and Jonson that crystallize those tensions that would come to define modernity. The first pair of poems will be Donne's "The Canonization" and Jonson's "Inviting a Friend to Supper," poems that set the self against the world. The second set will be two poems on death: Donne's Holy Sonnet 10, "Death be not proud," and Jonson's epitaph "On my First Son," the one very abstract, the other personal. The final set will be two poems on unrequited love: Donne's bitter "The Funeral" and Jonson's ironic "My Picture Left in Scotland."

Rebecca W. Bushnell was appointed dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor in January 2005. She is a professor of English who has served on the Penn faculty since 1982 and is also a member of the graduate groups in comparative literature and history.

Dr. Bushnell is a scholar of early modern English literature, culture, and history as well as an expert on the literary genre of tragedy. Her books include Prophesying Tragedy: Sign and Voice in Sophocles' Theban Plays; Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance; A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice; and Green Desire, a study of early modern English gardening books. She has recently edited A Companion to Tragedy for Blackwell Publishing and published Tragedy: A Short Introduction. She is also a recipient of the University's Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching.

book group 43: January 4-14, 2010 (ten days)

: Al Filreis

Hill Street Blues had already received critical and viewer acclaim in its first two seasons. But then something happened to take it to a new level. A brilliant young wayward academic--apprenticing to Robert Penn Warren at Yale--was brought to Hollywood from New Haven to write season 3. He was David Milch. Some have argued that the third season of Hill Street Blues was the finest TV drama then to date--and certainly, all agreed, it rivaled Golden Age television drama from the 1950s. At turns quirky, tragi-comic, sociologically intense, and lyrical, Milch's Hill Street station gives us plenty to discuss. The entire season's episodes are available free at Hulu. (Just type "Hill Street Blues season 3" in the hulu searchbox.) When the time of our discussion approaches, Professor Filreis will email the list of episodes Milch wrote.

Al Filreis, Kelly Professor and Faculty Director of the Writers House, has led many online book groups and has taught several all-online semester-long courses. He has won many teaching awards (Lindback, Ira Abrams) and was named the Pennsylvania Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation. He produced and hosts several podcasts, writes several blogs, and maintains vast web sites on modern poetry, the cold-war culture of the 1950s, and the Holocaust. He has published four books including, most recently, Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry. Here is Al's web site.

book group 44: January 15-25, 2010 (ten days)

: Erin Gautsche

Amy Bloom is the author of two novels, two collections of short stories, and a nominee for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and numerous anthologies here and abroad. She has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, among many other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award. Her latest novel, Away, is an epic story about a Russian immigrant. She lives in Connecticut and teaches at Yale University.

These two stories express common themes in Bloom work's - the darkness and depth of familial relationships, heartbreak inherent in intimate relationships, eventual and unavoidable transformation of self, and how love transforms our lives in unexpected ways. In "Love is Not a Pie" a mother's death recalls her daughter's memories of the best years of their lives together, and forces new realizations and acceptance in both children about their parents' complicated love. In "A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You," a mother learns to let her beautiful daughter go as she helps her prepare for a gender-altering surgery.

Erin Gautsche is the Program Coordinator at the Kelly Writers House. She has a BA in English from Goshen College and an MLA in 20th Century Art History and Poetics from the University of Pennsylvania. With interests in fiction, folklore, food writing, and urban sustainability, she has most recently written for the blogs Veggicurious and Farm to Philly and GRID magazine.

book group 45: February 1-March 1, 2010 (one month)

: Peter Decherney

Are new technologies and the internet undoing the one-directional flow of media that dominated the Twentieth Century? Are we moving from a read-only culture to a participatory, read/write culture in which the distinctions between artists, critics, and consumers are blurring? If so, how can businesses and cultural policy catch up to these technologies and the digital natives who have grown up online? In his most recent book, Remix, Harvard Law professor and popular author Lawrence Lessig chronicles the changing nature of creativity, and he investigates a number of businesses from Google to Craigslist, asking how well they have adapted to the new hybrid economy in which amateur media can be as popular and profitable as mainstream media. During the month, we will consider Lessig's many intriguing case studies, his bold policy suggestions, and the future of creativity and the ineternet. Professor Lessig has generously agreed to take some of our questions at the end of the month.

Peter Decherney is the Stephen M. Gorn Family Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research and teaching focus on the history of media regulation and on internet policy, specifically the interaction between Hollywood and Washington. He is the author of Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American (Columbia UP, 2005) and many articles on the Hollywood film industry, on the history of media regulation, and on fair use and academia, among other topics. In 2006, along with two colleagues, he successfully petitioned for an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for media professors using clips for teaching. In addition to Penn, Decherney has taught at Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Tsinghua University (Beijing). He is currently working on a new book on the history and future of Hollywood and copyright law.

book group 46: May 18-28, 2010 (ten days)

The prose of Vladimir Nabokov - infinitely nuanced, at turns satirical and lyrical - deserves close patient reading and attention. Readers do well to dwell on this writing, so that's just what we'll do. We will read two elegant stories by Nabokov and will try to discern what makes these accumulations of brilliant sentences into narrative so memorable. This group is apt for those who've been reading Nabokov all their lives and also for those who have never yet given him a try. The rookies will be introduced to a new good habit; the vets will be refreshed.

David Roberts is a member of the Kelly Writers House Advisory Board, a denizen of the KWH book groups and when he is not reading, works in Manhattan in the investment business. He is a 1983 graduate of the University Of Pennsylvania.