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.