ONCE1285 - Character Development (Book discussion)

Course Description

Join us this fall as we discuss the novels of four celebrated authors whose characters struggle for agency against the backdrops of war, racism, and misogyny. We begin with Colm Tóibín’s Long Island about Eilis Lacy, Irish, (now American) housewife and mother, plotting to escape a future as untenable as it is humiliating. We follow with Percival Everett’s James, a reimagining of Huckleberry Finn’s Jim, who chances a perilous escape from slavery. Next is Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose, a tale of French teenagers Fabienne and Agnès who aim to write their way out of post-war rural poverty through an elaborate literary hoax. We conclude with Alice McDermott’s Absolution in which Patricia, an American Army wife stationed in Hanoi during the Vietnamese war, is lured by a friend’s twisted altruism into questionable acts of kindness.

Notes

Miriam Camitta, PhD, MS, MFA, has been teaching the Book Discussion class at Temple University for twenty years. A writer, folklorist and life-long educator, her creative non-fiction can be found in The Masters Review, Fourth Genre, is forthcoming in Image Journal, and has been recognized as a notable in Best American Essays of 2023, won Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train Magazine, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, 2023. She lives outside of Philadelphia with her husband and daughter’s cat.