Literature Discussion Group: Next Meeting: January 30th, Ethan Frome

25 January 2012

Next Meeting: January 30th, Ethan Frome

Our next meeting is on Monday, January 30^th at 1pm at the Ralstons’ house in South Portland, and we will be discussing Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. I chose this novel specifically for this time of year because it takes place in New England in the midst of winter.

One thing I want you to consider is how the New England winter is represented in this novel. What is winter in Starkfield like? Does this view of a New England winter fit with your personal experience?

Another thing I’d like you to consider, and be ready to discuss, is the integrity of each of the novel’s primary characters: Ethan, Zeena, and Mattie. To that end, please come prepared to support – or argue against – one of the following statements:

Ethan is a wonderful husband.

Zeena is a terrible wife.

Mattie is an innocent bystander.

Choose one of the above statements (or its opposite, i.e., “Ethan is a terrible husband”) and find quotes from the book – things a character does or says, events that occur, ideas that are implied by the narrator – to support it. Be sure to jot down the quotes and their page numbers so you can reference them, and please bring your copy of Ethan Frome with you. If you wish, you can choose more than one statement, or be ready to argue both sides for one of them.

It should be a fun discussion. See you on 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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25 January 2012

Next Meeting: January 30th, Ethan Frome

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