MFA Schedule: Friday, Jan. 6

Public Event Schedule

Join us for faculty lectures in Canon Lounge in Gladfelter:

Friday, January 6 -9:30 AM

C. J. HRIBAL: The Intimate Distance of Bohumil Hrabal 

Novels and stories narrated in the first person are essentially monologues, but what happens when this is taken to an extreme? Bohumil Hrabal likes to call his writing style “palavering,” or as the critic James Wood calls it, “anecdote without end.” His narratives move forward through narrators who, once they’re wound up, just keep talking and talking and talking, spilling all their (and other people’s) secrets, like the singer in Sonny Boy Williams’ “Don’t Start Me to Talkin’” (“Don’t start me to talkin’, I’ll tell everything I know”). This lecture will serve as an introduction to Hrabal’s work, with attention paid to what we can learn from this highly idiosyncratic style. Texts discussed will include: Closely Watched Trains, I Served the King of England, and Too Loud a Solitude. Other texts referred to will include The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, and his story collection, The Death of Mr. Baltisberger (among others). Handouts will be provided, but reading one of the above is recommended.

Friday, January 6 -10:45 AM

ELEANOR WILNER: Disguise and Discovery: The Masks of Art

The talk will explore opposing uses of the mask in the world of doing vs. the world of making; in the latter, the role of the mask of art in the imaginative opening of identity to plurality, and of self to other. Handouts will be provided.

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Join us at 8:15 p.m. in Canon Lounge in Gladfelter for a reading featuring faculty members:

Martha Rhodes
Kevin McIlvoy
Connie Voisine
Laura van den Berg

For more information, including a full schedule of public events, please visit the program website at http://www.wwcmfa.org/public-schedule-for-mfa-winter-residency-is-here/.