Object Lessons: Novels of Urban Domesticity
Meeting Dates:
2/19, 3/19, 4/09
In Person at The Center for Fiction
“It is on the basis of luxury that the lost simplicity is consumed.”
Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society
In this reading group, we’ll consider three novels that cast an anthropological gaze at the objects and rituals with which urban couples enact their desires for stability and meaning. We’ll start with Georges Perec’s Things, his classic short novel from the 1960s, which offers a near-inventory of the lives of a Parisian couple. Our second novel, Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, refigures Perec’s novel in the era of Instagram. We’ll then examine Aysegül Savas’ The Anthropologists, which, like Perfection, takes up the everyday lives of a millennial couple attempting to cultivate urban domesticity in the face of the homogenizing forces of globalization.
What to read in advance of the first meeting: Things by Georges Perec
What to expect from this reading group: This group is seminar-style and participant-driven, with some initial structure and observations to focus and warm up our conversations.
Reading List:
Session I: Things by Georges Perec
Session II: Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico
Session III: The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas
Flâneur/Flâneuse
Meeting Dates:
7/1, 7/22, 8/12
In Person at The Center for Fiction
In this reading group, we’ll look at three novels where walking and wandering play a central role. Casting off habitual perceptions and preoccupations, our narrators take long, rambling walks, creating a free-wheeling narrative momentum which ignites potent and surprising meditations on history, memory, art, and culture. Two of our three narrators draw on the tradition of the flâneur/flâneuse, urban wanderers who explore the ever-shifting creative possibilities of the city. Using short passages from Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust and Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse for context, we’ll consider the ways in which our three novels use wandering as a structural device and as a metaphor for the labyrinthine possibilities of the self.
What to read in advance of the first meeting: Open City by Teju Cole
What to expect from this reading group: This group is seminar-style and participant-driven, with some initial structure and observations to focus and warm up our conversations.
Reading List:
Session I: Open City by Teju Cole
Session II: Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys
Session III: The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald
How Should A Woman Be? Three Novels About Women and Freedom: Reading Group at the Center for Fiction, Brooklyn
Meeting Dates:
3/27, 4/17, 5/8
In Person at The Center for Fiction
Session I: A Room With a View by E.M. Forster
Session II: How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti
Session III: All Fours by Miranda July
Sheila Heti’s delightfully astute novel How Should a Person Be? pursues its title’s question with a winning combination of zest and philosophical gravity: How do any of us actually know how to act in the world?
In this reading group, we’ll look at three novels where female protagonists face confusion surrounding how best to live—and as women, how best to live free from gendered social constraints. We’ll start with a 19th-century novel, E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, where the protagonist has to slowly unknit everything she’s learned about “how a woman should be” in order to find—possibly—happiness.
Investigating the ways in which our first protagonist’s transfiguration has been constrained by a male author within the confines of a marriage plot, we’ll swivel to two contemporary and feminist takes on confusion where women in mid-life furiously interrogate and re-write social scripts in a move towards sexual and creative freedom. All three novels ask serious questions about how a person should be, hinting at both the stakes and creative possibilities of confusion.
Obsession and Ennui: Reading Group at the Center for Fiction, Brooklyn
In Person at The Center for Fiction
Meeting Dates:
7/25, 8/15, 9/5
Session I: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
Session II: The Idiot by Elif Batuman
Session III: I Love Dick by Chris Kraus
We’ll revisit the last decade of the 20th century in the company of three strange, erudite, and wildly entertaining novels. We’ll trace how our three irrepressibly original narrators mine boredom and obsession in feminist acts of becoming themselves, chronicling messy processes of self-realization with deadpan humor. We’ll also examine how these books braid elements of autobiography, epistolary novels, Künstlerroman, and Bildungsroman with the novel of ideas, creating at once hyper-specific and strikingly contemporary meditations on culture, art, language, and feminism.