Monday, June 8, 2020, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EDT

Holly York, Senior Lecturer Emerita, Department of French and Italian

“Reading Collaboratively: Poems by Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman”

For her April 6 Colloquium, Gretchen Schulz invited us to participate in what faculty and students might experience as their normal face-to-face courses migrated online to end the semester. She successfully guided the group through a close reading of James Joyce’s short story “Araby,” even though she herself was new to the remote learning format. The rich variety of experience contributed by our emeriti brought the work alive, even for those who might not otherwise have been enthusiasts of Joyce (or indeed of literature itself).

So let’s try poetry! With its highly figurative language, poetry lends itself particularly well to collaborative reading where participants co-create meaning. Holly York, who has had much experience in online work with literature in MOOCs she’s enrolled in during her retirement, will guide us through discussion of Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) and Walt Whitman (1819-1892), both radical poets for their time who are seen by some as polar opposite precursors of contemporary American poetry. She’ll ask us to do some “homework” ahead of time by reading several of the typically terse poems by Dickinson and a single section of Song of Myself by the longer-winded Whitman and then invite us into conversation with one another to see what we can make of this seminal material. We hope for as much revelatory fun as we enjoyed in examining “Araby.”