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Read the Classics: 1900s Novels

Join "the Great Conversation" of the literary imagination by participating in a four-part reading, lecture and discussion series focused on classic novels of the first half of the 1900s. Jay Dickson, Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College, will give short lectures providing background and then will lead the discussions. 2009-2010 season.

At Hollywood Library

First Sundays in October, December and February; fourth Sunday in March, 2–4 p.m.

The Discussions

A Passage to India by E.M. Forster · October 4, 2009
Swann's Way (In Search of Lost Time; v. 1) by Marcel Proust · December 6, 2009
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf · February 7, 2010 · Register online for the waiting list
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner · March 28, 2010 · Register online starting 2/7/2010

Registration is required for each session; register online, in the library or call 503.988.5391.

A limited supply of these books will be available at the preceding book discussions. Pick up a "bring-em-back" copy of the book, that you do not have to check out, at Woodstock Library after registering. Return the book at the discussion.

Meet your professor

Jay Dickson is Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College, where he specializes in 19th and 20th century British fiction. He has published articles on James Joyce, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and Queen Victoria. A native of Portland, he has also taught English at Princeton University and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

The Books

A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

A Passage to India Often regarded as Forster's greatest novel, A Passage to India was influential since its publication in 1924 in shaping the international public discourse surrounding the ethicality of the raj, Great Britain's direct political rule over the Indian subcontinent from 1858 to 1947. A young English woman visiting India for the first time to see her fiancé, a local magistrate in the Indian Civil Service, befriends a local Muslim doctor; a sightseeing trip they take together ends in disaster with the doctor imprisoned, the young woman in hysterics, and the ruling Anglo-Indians panicked and tightening ranks. Forster's novel is an exploration of a clash of cultures, but it is also a study of the limits of human relations in the face of larger political pressures.

Swann's Way (In Search of Lost Time, v. 1) by Marcel Proust

Swann's Way Proust's seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time (also translated as Remembrance of Things Past) is almost universally regarded as the greatest achievement of French fiction in the 20th century. The first volume, the 1913 Swann's Way, not only introduces us to the major themes of Proust's great work (memory, obsessive desire, high society, and the passage of time) but also to many of the unforgettable core characters in the work: around Marcel, the novel's endlessly introspective and sensitive young hero, rotate his doting parents, the wealthy Jewish lawyer Charles Swann, Swann's mercurial love Odette de Crécy, and the powerful and socially unimpeachable Guermantes family.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway The direct inspiration for Michael Cunningham's prize-winning novel The Hours (and the subsequent 2002 Stephen Daldry film of the same name based on that work), Virginia Woolf's perfectly constructed 1925 Mrs. Dalloway is the study of a wealthy London political hostess and her society on one particular June day in 1923. Woolf's narrative shows us the hidden mechanisms behind Clarissa Dalloway's actions as she prepares for a large party that evening, and how her thoughts turn to an examination of the choices she has made in her life; so too does it unravel the hidden worlds of thought behind the dozens of others whom Clarissa Dalloway passes … in particular, a young veteran of the recent World War who cannot help but remember the horrors of that event that Clarissa's London works so desperately to repress.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

The Sound and the Fury unravels the disintegration of the Compson family, former genteel Southern patricians, through the consciousnesses of four of its members: Benjy, the Compson son afflicted with mental retardation; his dreamy and sensitive Harvard-educated brother Quentin; his other brother, the cynical and pragmatic Jason; and the family's African American servant Dilsey. The family's fall encapsulated for Faulkner the problems of the reconstructed South — racism, greed, pride and fatalism — that he saw crippling the region in the 20th century.

Original annotations of the discussion titles by Jay Dickson, Reed College.