Virtual Literary Lecture Series: "Gender Dramas" with Professor Philip Weinstein

 Professor Philip Weinstein, the Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor Emeritus of English at Swarthmore College

The Vineyard Haven Public Library is pleased to announce "Gender Dramas," a seven-part virtual lecture series with Professor Philip Weinstein, the Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor Emeritus of English at Swarthmore College. Beginning September 8th, Professor Weinstein will explore dramas of yearning and desire in three remarkable novels of the 19th and early 20th century: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1851), Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878), and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925). This virtual lecture series will be held via Zoom from 7:00 - 8:30 pm on the following Tuesdays: Sept. 8, Sept. 22, Oct. 6, Oct. 27, Nov. 10, Dec. 1, and Dec. 15. 

Gender Dramas will be hosted on Zoom by Lifelong Learning Swarthmore. Professor Weinstein and Lifelong Learning Swarthmore have generously arranged for Martha’s Vineyard library patrons to participate in this program at no charge. To sign up for complimentary access, patrons may register here. Login instructions will be sent to registered library participants prior to the first session. 

Lectures will be held from 7:00 - 8:30 pm on the following Tuesdays as follows:

Tuesday, Sept. 8, 7:00 - 8:30 PM: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Tuesday, Sept. 22, 7:00 - 8:30 PM: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Tuesday, Oct 6, 7:00 - 8:30 PM: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Tuesday, Oct 27, 7:00 - 8:30 PM: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Tuesday, Nov 10, 7:00 - 8:30 PM: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Tuesday, Dec 1, 7:00 - 8:30 PM: Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Tuesday, Dec 15, 7:00 - 8:30 PM: Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

“What does a woman want?” Freud’s famous question has been asked — and in strikingly different ways illuminated — by writers well before and after Freud. We shall explore dramas of yearning and desire in three remarkable novels of the 19th and early 20th century: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1851), Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878), and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925). The heroines in these novels memorably confront and engage gender norms operative in their culture. What light does each novel shed on the struggles engaged? How do the novels’ embodied stance toward such gender arrangements affect that light? Perhaps a third question as well: how does their way of dramatizing these issues provoke questions of your own? “Gender” serves as the fulcrum in this course description, but our aim goes beyond any set of “prescriptions” or “proscriptions.” Rather, it is to do justice to each writer’s creative take on the drama of yearning and desire.

Philip Weinstein earned his PhD in English from Harvard University, staying on to teach at Harvard for the next 3 years. He then accepted a position at Swarthmore, where he remained for over 40 years, becoming the Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English. He has written several books of literary criticism, many focused on Faulkner, including “Becoming Faulkner: The Art and Life of William Faulkner,” which won the Hugh Holman Award for the best book of literary scholarship or literary criticism in the field of southern literature published in 2010. In 2015, Weinstein retired from Swarthmore and moved to Martha’s Vineyard full-time. Since then, he’s gone on to write three more books and to continue teaching adults through the Vineyard Haven Public Library, Swarthmore Lifelong Learning, and the 92nd Street Y in New York.

Author Talk - “Numinosity: A New England Forester’s Search for the Ineffable” by Bob Perschel

The Vineyard Haven Public Library is pleased to welcome Vineyard resident and professional forester Bob Perschel for a talk about his fifty-year quest in pursuit of something larger than all of us, a quest documented in his new book, “Numinosity: A New England Forester’s Search for the Ineffable.” This event will be held at 4:00 PM on Friday, September 4th, at the Vineyard Haven Public Library, located at 200 Main Street in Vineyard Haven. Free and open to the public, no registration required.

“Numinosity: A New England Forester’s Search for the Ineffable” is a collection of stories and poems offering a rare and moving account of what happens when deep scientific knowledge of the forest meets a search for transcendence within it. Drawing on Jungian concepts of the numinous, those encounters with an awe-inspiring force that defies full articulation, Perschel’s poems emerge from the lived intimacy of forest work: marking timber alone in winter woods, listening to the life cycle of an ancient oak, and reckoning with the weight of human impact on a landscape. The result is a collection that is both deeply personal and urgently ecological.

The collection is organized into three thematic sections. The first, Forestry, explores the spiritual and ethical dimensions of forest stewardship through poems including “Marking Timber,” “Lie Down: A Forester’s Directive,” and “The Last Twitch.”  The second section, Life, reveals how the natural world can provide meaning and weave its influence through our lives with poems such as “Meeting the Green Lady”, “The Place Where Life Begins”, and “Snake River Bar.”   The third section, Climate Change, confronts the moral stakes of the current environmental crisis with poems such as “Epistle to Left on the Earth,” “J.D. Skis Ukraine,” and “Memo to a Prospective Leader.”

Robert T. Perschel has helped conserve six million acres of New England’s forests during a four-decade career as a professional forester. He chaired the 53-member Northern Forest Alliance and co-founded the Forest Stewards Guild, a national organization of ecologically focused foresters. As Executive Director of the New England Forestry Foundation, he led the creation of Exemplary Forestry standards that use climate-smart management to offset significant regional carbon emissions. He holds a Psychology degree from Yale College (1973) and a Masters of Forestry Science from the Yale School of the Environment (1979). Bob lives in an oak forest on the north shore of Martha’s Vineyard.

For more information, please contact the library at vhpl_programs@clamsnet.org or (508) 696-4211.