Somerville at "Faculty after Hours"
Shannon Odell
Issue date: 9/24/09 Section: Arts
Associate Professor of English John Somerville will give a lecture today titled "Above Us Only Sky: Ordeal and Meaning in Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor, Richard Ford and Don Delillo."
The lecture is part of a series hosted by the Mossey Library called "Our Faculty, After Hours", which was created to highlight the interests and pursuits of the Hillsdale faculty outside of the classroom. The talk will be held in the Heritage Room at 4 p.m
Somerville will be speaking about the fiction and other writings of Percy, O'Connor, Ford and Delillo. He will be addressing a central theme of how those authors responded to suffering and tragedy, and how their reactions are displayed in their works.
Somerville noted that some authors have suggested that a small part of a human being wants calamity to come, especially when life is easy. He will analyze this idea through the works of the four authors and by providing a few examples from his own life.
Somerville asks, "Could we be shaken out of our everydayness if we knew that tomorrow [calamity] was going to come?"
He said he hopes students will come out of the lecture thinking more about that question.
He also wants to encourage within the students the desire to read the works of Richard Ford and Don Delillo, authors that are lesser-known than Percy and O'Connor.
The lecture is part of a series hosted by the Mossey Library called "Our Faculty, After Hours", which was created to highlight the interests and pursuits of the Hillsdale faculty outside of the classroom. The talk will be held in the Heritage Room at 4 p.m
Somerville will be speaking about the fiction and other writings of Percy, O'Connor, Ford and Delillo. He will be addressing a central theme of how those authors responded to suffering and tragedy, and how their reactions are displayed in their works.
Somerville noted that some authors have suggested that a small part of a human being wants calamity to come, especially when life is easy. He will analyze this idea through the works of the four authors and by providing a few examples from his own life.
Somerville asks, "Could we be shaken out of our everydayness if we knew that tomorrow [calamity] was going to come?"
He said he hopes students will come out of the lecture thinking more about that question.
He also wants to encourage within the students the desire to read the works of Richard Ford and Don Delillo, authors that are lesser-known than Percy and O'Connor.
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