Literature Discussion Group: February 2012

28 February 2012

started reading the book!

so i just started reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.

SPOILER ALERT: the dog gets stabbed with a fork.

I hope you're all enjoying our current selection, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. Christopher Boone is certainly a distinctive character and his unique perspective provides an interesting look at how point of view can affect a story. It also gives us another chance to examine whether we have a reliable or unreliable narrator.

We'll be meeting on Monday, March 5th at 1pm, and it would be great if everyone could come prepared with one question to ask the group about the book. Try to make your question open-ended. By that, I mean try to craft a question that can't be answered with a simple yes or no or a specific piece of information. Try to make it something that will require people to give an opinion or an explanation.

Here are some examples of closed-ended and open ended questions.

Closed-ended:
Do you get along with your sister?
Are those new shoes?
Is Barack Obama a good president?
Where do you live?

Open-ended:
What is your relationship with your sister like?
Tell me about your shoes.
How do you feel about our current president?
Describe your hometown.

Make sense? If not, feel free to comment below or email for further clarification.

In addition to your open-ended question for our discussion, please also feel free to bring along any other questions you have or any materials you think could add to our exploration and understanding of the book. You know I'll have plenty to discuss, but I would love to have you all help drive this discussion, too.

See you Monday!

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Looking For Hamlet Scholar Talk

This is another event at the PPL in March in honor of the First Folio Exhibit, and it's on Wednesday, March 9th from 12-1:30pm in the Rines Auditorium.

"Focusing on Hamlet, University of Southern Maine Professor Ben Bertram will examine the way editors, directors, actors, teachers, and scholars choose among folio, quarto, or conflated versions of the plays. He will also be accompanied by actors who will perform Hamlet’s soliloquies and join in a discussion of how Shakespeare’s words make it from the page to the stage."

Get the full description here.

Definitions and Clarifications

pneumatic, adj. - literally, full of air. This term is often used to describe women in BNW, and seems to suggest that a woman like Lenina, who's "wonderfully pneumatic," is buxom, curvy, shapely, and yes, even bouncy. But pneumatic could also have a second meaning here, and that is to indicate that someone is a bit of an air-head, light on the intellectual matter, or not bogged down by weighty matters or considerations.

viviparous, adj. - a creature that is viviparous gives birth to live young that develop inside the body, as in the way mammals reproduce. Humans are viviparous (at least, they were until A.F. 632).

Malthusian, adj. - based on the beliefs of Robert Thomas Malthus, a British economist who argued that "population tends to increase faster than food supply, with inevitably disastrous results unless the increase in population is checked by moral restraints or by war, famine, and disease." - The Free Dictionary

Pavlovian Conditioning, n. - also called Classic Conditioning, it's a way of getting a subject to make certain associations between two previously unrelated things; Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was the psychologist who discovered that if he always rang a bell right before feeding his dogs, they came to associate the sound of the bell with getting fed, and therefore would start to drool upon hearing the bell. Here's a great comic related to that experiment.

Literature Discussion Group

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28 February 2012

started reading the book!

Next Meeting: March 5th