Reading Groups

School Days with Anne Fernald (Sold Out)

Four Sessions Mondays, 6:00 pm EDT - 7:30 pm EDT February 6 to May 22, 2023

The Center for Fiction

featured-images.reading-groups.2022-winter

This reading group has reached its capacity. To join the waitlist, please email Sam Lim-Kimberg at [email protected].

Meeting Dates:
2/6, 3/6, 4/17, 5/22
In Person at The Center for Fiction

In this reading group, we’ll read four 20th century novels about school, from James Joyce, Muriel Spark, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Louis Begley. Central to each of these stories is how school shapes us: each novel features a strong protagonist, profoundly shaped by the institution of school. From grammar school to university, with bad teachers in all varieties, these novels explore the hunger for learning and the sinking feeling that school isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Session I: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Session II: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
Session III: Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
Session IV: The Man Who Was Late by Louis Begley

Led by

Anne Fernald

Anne Fernald

Anne Fernald is Professor of English and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at Fordham University. A Woolf scholar, she is the editor of the Norton Critical edition of Mrs. Dalloway and The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf. She is at work on a collective biography of modernist women writers.

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