Posts tagged ‘Professor’s Corner’
Professor’s Corner presents “Conversations between Our Souls”: Poems by Chinese Nobel Laureate Lui Xiaobo to His Wife
Professor’s Corner, a discussion group devoted to literary texts, will meet at the South Branch Library on Wednesday, May 8. Dr. Lei Zhang, who is a Professor of English at Texas Woman’s University, will lead a discussion about the poetry of Liu Xiaobo.
Liu Xiaobo, writer and human rights activist, won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, but he was not permitted to travel to Norway to receive it. He was in Jinzhou Prison, and currently is serving an eleven-year sentence for “incitement to subvert state power.” His book, No Enemies, No Hatred, includes essays and poems on a wide range of social and political topics and reveals his sharp intellect and audacity at criticizing China’s authoritarian regime and social ills.
For this session we’ll examine several poems written by Liu Xiaobo to his wife, Liu Xia, from his “re-education labor camp.” Xia is herself a poet and applied to marry Xiaobo while he was imprisoned. Liu has written some of his best poetry from prison, addressing the poems to his wife, who is separated from him by more than 1,000 miles. These poems are not just love poems; they are Liu’s reflections on a variety of topics, such as social oppression, St. Augustine, and Van Gogh. The poems are a spiritual conversation between two courageous poets.
When: Wednesday, May 8 at 7:00 pm
Where: Denton Public Library – South Branch
3228 Teasley Lane in Denton
There is no cost to attend this program, and refreshments will be available. Copies of poems are available at all three library branches.
For more information, please call (940) 349-8752 or email Fred.Kamman@cityofdenton.com.
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Professor’s Corner Presents President Obama’s Victory Speeches and Inaugural Addresses
Professor’s Corner, a discussion group devoted to literary texts, will meet at the South Branch Library on Wednesday, February 13. Dr. Michele Lockhart will lead a discussion analyzing four of Barak Obama’s speeches.
President Barack Obama, recently elected into his second term as President of the United States, has delivered many speeches throughout his political career. Perhaps two of the most publicized and viewed speeches for any U. S. President are the victory speech and the inaugural address; Obama has delivered two of each. For this presentation, we’ll discuss President Obama’s victory speeches (2008 & 2012) and inaugural addresses (2009 & 2013). The content within each pair of speeches will be analyzed; topics such as leadership, family, freedom, and challenges facing the U. S. will be explored, among others. Language patterns will be analyzed. Speechwriters, the power of delivery, and audience awareness will be addressed as well. Dr. Lockhart holds the Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Texas Woman’s University.
When: Wednesday, February 13 at 7:00 pm
Where: Denton Public Library – South Branch
3228 Teasley Lane in Denton
There is no cost to attend this program, and refreshments will be available.
If you would like Internet links to the speeches or essays and background information relevant to the discussion, please call the library at (940) 349-8726, or email the address below.
For more information, please call (940) 349-8752 or email Fred.Kamman@cityofdenton.com.
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For other news items on the City of Denton, visit our website at www.cityofdenton.com, go to Quick Links and click on Press Releases.
Professor’s Corner Presents Mister Pip: a Novel by New Zealand Writer Lloyd Jones
Professor’s Corner, a discussion group devoted to literary texts, will meet at the South Branch Library on Wednesday, October 10. Dr. Russell Greer will lead a discussion about the novel Mister Pip by New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones.
Mister Pip is deeply influenced and shaped by Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. Mister Pip is set against the backdrop of a civil war in a small Pacific island in the 1990s, and the central character is a young girl named Matilda who is caught up in that war. Her engagement to the Dickens novel and her teacher, the only white man left on the island, sustains her in the chaos of war.
Mister Pip was shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2007 and won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for best book in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. The novel has been made into a film starring Hugh Laurie and will be released within the next several months.
Background on the novel can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Pip and http://www.randomhouse.com/book/88486/mister-pip-by-lloyd-jones#excerpt . An excerpt is available at http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/mister-pip-lloyd-jones/1100297359?ean=9780385341073 .
Dr. Greer is a professor of English at Texas Woman’s University.
When: Wednesday, October 10 at 7:00 pm
Where: Denton Public Library – South Branch
3228 Teasley Lane in Denton
For more information, please call (940) 349-8752 or email Fred.Kamman@cityofdenton.com.
Professor’s Corner presents Rudolph Fisher: the Best Harlem Renaissance Writer You’ve Never Heard Of
Come celebrate Black History Month with a look backwards – courtesy of the best Harlem Renaissance writer you’ve never heard of, Rudolph Fisher. Professor’s Corner, a discussion group devoted to literary texts, will meet at the South Branch on Wednesday, February 8 at 7 pm. Genevieve West, professor of English at Texas Woman’s University, will present some biographical information about Fisher and lead a discussion about his stories “City of Refuge” and “High Yaller.”
Rudolph Fisher (1897-1934) was a physician and fiction writer who published his first short story at the height of the Harlem Renaissance in 1925, only to die tragically from stomach cancer nine years later. The author of two novels (including the first African-American detective novel) and numerous short stories, Fisher wrote exclusively about Harlem life, taking us inside the class, skin color, generational, regional, and gender conflicts that impacted the lives of those who left the South for urban opportunities in the 1920’s. His fiction is populated with the everyday folks who made Harlem home: door men, students, dancers, criminals, grandmothers, real estate moguls, police officers, and seamstresses.
We’ll explore two of his best stories. “City of Refuge,” which appeared in Atlantic Monthly in 1925, has become a hallmark example of migration fiction and focuses on the under-life of Harlem. The second, “High Yaller,” appeared the same year in The Crisis, but it looks at the middle-class life of light-skinned African Americans. From a historical perspective, reading Fisher’s fiction provides a look at the diverse lives of Harlemites in the twenties, but the carefully-wrought fiction also reflects Harlem Renaissance artists’ interests in incorporating folk – their language and their music – into art.
When: Wednesday, February 8 at 7:00 pm
Where: Denton Public Library – South Branch
3228 Teasley Lane in Denton
For more information, please call (940) 349-8752 or email Fred.Kamman@cityofdenton.com.
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For other news items on the City of Denton, visit our website at www.cityofdenton.com, go to Quick Links and click on Press Releases.
Professor’s Corner: Robert Penn Warren and Robinson Jeffers
Robert Penn Warren
Professor’s Corner, a discussion group devoted to literary texts, will meet at the South Branch on Wednesday, December 14 at 7 pm. Keri Overall, professor of English at Texas Woman’s University, will lead a discussion about the symbolism of the red-tailed hawk in some poems by Robert Penn Warren and Robinson Jeffers.
The Southern poet, Robert Penn Warren, and the Western poet, Robinson Jeffers, though separated by nearly forty years, both employed the red-tailed hawk in several poems. For both poets, the hawk was a symbol of the downfall of power and man’s destructive effects on the natural world. We will discuss two poems by Warren and two poems by Jeffers that focus on the red-tailed hawk and reveal a striking similarity in their importance for the authors’ lives and in their view of the world.
When: Wednesday, December 14 at 7:00 pm
Where: Denton Public Library – South Branch
3228 Teasley Lane in Denton
For more information, please call (940) 349-8752 or email Fred.Kamman@cityofdenton.com.
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For other news items on the City of Denton, visit our website at www.cityofdenton.com, go to Quick Links and click on Press Releases.
Identifying Shakespeare: Unmasking the Bard
Professor’s Corner, a discussion group devoted to literary texts, will meet at the South Branch on Wednesday, October 12 at 7. Gray Scott, professor of English at Texas Woman’s University, will lead a discussion about the Shakespeare authorship controversy.
English scholars insist the author behind Hamlet and Othello was a man named William Shakespeare. Many actors, journalists, judges, directors, and a host of other fans generally outside of academia think someone else wrote those works, the leading contender being Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. An upcoming movie by Independence Day director Roland Emmerich, entitled Anonymous, will put the Earl of Oxford’s claim to the box office test. An online Declaration of Reasonable Doubt has, meanwhile, circulated, drawing signatures from such figures as Derek Jacobi (who is in Emmerich’s film).
This session of Professor’s Corner will explore some of the difficulties faced by anyone who wants to solve the mystery—indeed by anyone hoping to definitively identify the author of any Renaissance play—and perhaps reveal why the above debate is unlikely to be resolved any time soon, as well as why it’s so easy to propose new Shakespeares.
When: Wednesday, October 12 at 7:00 pm
Where: Denton Public Library – South Branch
3228 Teasley Lane in Denton
For more information, please call 940-349-8752 or email Fred.Kamman@cityofdenton.com.
For other news items on the City of Denton, visit our website at www.cityofdenton.com, go to Quick Links and click on Press Releases.
Zora Neale Hurston Reconsidered: Urban Stories
Denton, TX – Professor’s Corner, a free discussion group devoted to literary texts, will meet at the Denton Public Library – South Branch on Wednesday, April 13 at 7:00PM. Dr. Genevieve West, TWU Department of English, Speech, and Foreign Languages, will lead a discussion about three of Hurston’s short stories, two of which have been recently rediscovered.
Zora Neale Hurston is typically known as the author of rural 1930s stories set in her native Florida. It has been asserted that Hurston’s fiction constitutes an “erasure” of the Great Migration, during which as many as 15 million African-Americans migrated from the rural South to the urban centers of the North and Mid-West. Recently rediscovered stories by Hurston, which are set in the North and were written between 1922 and 1934, reveal a woman who was very much aware of urban relocation and the challenges faced by those attempting to start life anew in the North.
The discussion will focus on the short stories “She Rock,” “The Country in the Woman,” and “Muttsy.”
When: Wednesday, April 13, 7:00 pm
Where: Denton South Branch Library, 3228 Teasley Lane
For more information, contact Fred Kamman at 940-349-8726 or Fred.Kamman@cityofdenton.com.
The Love Sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay
Professor’s Corner, a free discussion group devoted to literary texts, will meet at the South Branch library on Wednesday, February 9 at 7:00PM. Carl Smeller, professor of Humanities and English at Texas Wesleyan University, will lead a discussion about the love sonnet’s of Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Although she was one of the most prolific and most celebrated American poets in the decade between the world wars, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s critical reputation declined precipitously in the years following her death in 1950. But recent re-evaluations of her work reveal what the poet Richard Wilbur called “some of the best sonnets of the century.”
In honor of Valentine’s Day, this session of Professor’s Corner will examine just a few of the many surprisingly unconventional love sonnets Millay wrote.
When: Wednesday, February 9 at 7:00 pm
Where: Denton Public Library – South Branch
3228 Teasley Lane in Denton
For more information, contact Fred Kamman at 940.349.8726 or Fred.Kamman@cityofdenton.com.
For other news items on the City of Denton, visit our website at www.cityofdenton.com, go to Quick Information and click on Press Releases.
The Meaning of Narrative
Professor’s Corner, a free discussion group devoted to literary texts, will meet at the South Branch library on Wednesday, January 12 at 7:00PM.
What makes a good story? Are stories entertainments, or something more? Why do stories matter so much to us? Joe Milazzo (freelance writer, editor, librarian, educator, and designer) will lead a discussion of Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller,” which is a reflection on narrative’s past, present, and future in light of these, and other, questions.
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is one of the most unclassifiable figures in the Western intellectual tradition. Neither a philosopher nor a historian, a poet or a critic, an artist or a mere collector of art objects, a Marxist, Surrealist or card carrier of any kind, Benjamin’s range of interests, his deep and unusual understanding of modern experience and his highly original prose style have been a deep influence on subsequent generations of writers.
When: Wednesday, January 12 at 7:00 pm
Where: Denton Public Library – South Branch
3228 Teasley Lane in Denton
For more information, contact Fred Kamman at 940.349.8726 or Fred.Kamman@cityofdenton.com.
For other news items on the City of Denton, visit our website at www.cityofdenton.com, go to Quick Information and click on Press Releases.
Reading Richard Wright – Professor’s Corner
Professor’s Corner: A Discussion Group Devoted to Literary Texts
Wednesday, November 12th at 7:00PM
South Branch Library
Reading Richard Wright
Presented by:
Dr. Darryl Dickson-Carr,
Southern Methodist University
On September 4, 1908, a little more than one hundred years ago, novelist Richard Wright was born just outside of Natchez, Mississippi. Wright would eventually transform himself into one of the most important writers of fiction in the twentieth century through his landmark works, the collection of novellas Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), the novel Native Son (1940), and his autobiography, Black Boy (1945). Wright brought hard-hitting naturalism to African American fiction and, in the process, created popular literature transformed American literature forever.
This presentation will provide an overview of Wright’s life and early work, with special attention paid to Native Son and Wright’s own thoughts on the role of fiction in depicting African Americans’ struggles.
Readings for this presentation can be found at any of the Denton Public Library Branches.
For more information please contact Kimberly Wells at 940-349-8796.
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