March 5 Herman Melville Meets Agatha Christie

Date: Tuesday, March 5, 2019
Time: 4:15 p.m.
Location: Burling Library First Floor Lounge

Novelist Joyce Carol Oates once said, “Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.” History Professor Elizabeth Prevost and English Professor Ralph Savarese will lead a discussion about the deceptively simple act of reading.

Prevost's current book project is about global consumptions of genre fiction, particularly murder mysteries. Savarese has published a book entitled, See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor (Duke University Press, 2018), about autistic readers who very much defy the strictly pathological understanding of their difference.

Next fall, they will teach the Newberry Library Seminar in Chicago. That seminar is titled "One for the Books: On the Pleasures and Politics of Reading."

This talk was postponed last month due to weather.