Reading Groups

Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary with Mike Levine

Once a week Tuesdays, 6:30 pm EDT - 8:00 pm EDT April 1 to April 22, 2025

The Center for Fiction

The ‘With Books’ option includes the title required for this group at a 10% discount from our Bookstore.

Meeting Dates:
4/1, 4/8, 4/15, 4/22
In Person at The Center for Fiction

Describing in a letter what would become Madame Bovary, Flaubert wrote that it would be “a book about nothing.” The prosecutors who charged him with obscenity after the novel’s serialization clearly thought it was about something, though he was acquitted before its publication in book form.

Flaubert’s description was apt insofar as the novel is about itself—about the capacity of language to constitute its own reality. If Flaubert’s novel anticipates the self-referential fiction that characterized 20th-century modernism, it can also be read as the apotheosis of 19th-century realism. Flaubert draws with merciless detail the French provincial bourgeois life in which Emma Bovary feels trapped. Inspired by sentimental romance novels, she is unable to abide a stultifying marriage and becomes ever more desperate to experience the grand passions of a literary heroine. Emma soon became the archetype of a kind of self-absorption that a French essayist termed Bovarysme. Madame Bovary is among the most powerful explorations of an eternal problem – how to negotiate the disparity between the world of our dreams and the one we inhabit.

What to read in advance of the first meeting: Part 1

What to expect from this reading group: Participants can expect a conversation prompted by questions from the instructor. They will be encouraged to form their own interpretations. The collective goal will be a deeper understanding of the book.

Reading List:

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (translated by Frances Steegmuller)

Capacity: 20

Led by

Mike Levine

Mike Levine

Mike Levine is an independent editor. He was previously an acquisitions editor at Northwestern University Press. Among the authors he published were Jen Beagin (Whiting Award winner), A. E. Stallings (National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, finalist), and Stephen Karam (Pulitzer Prize in Drama, finalist). He has also been a senior editor at the Great Books Foundation. Since 2000, he has taught literature and film seminars in several continuing education programs. He has a B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis and a Ph.D. in English from Rice University.

About this series

Reading Groups

Whether you’re looking to catch up on great novels or you’re interested in exploring a new writer or literary period, our reading groups offer high-level literary discussion led by experts in the field.

Groups+Workshops

More Groups+Workshops

Groups+Workshops