SC Book Club October 2, 2023, at 2-4pm – Fellows & External Fellows Only – Zoom Only
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October 2, 2023 @ 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Book Club: October 2, 2023, 2023, 2-4pm – Fellows and External Fellows – Zoom only.
Tom Stoppard, Arcadia (1993)
Discussion leader: Alexander Leggatt
Even if you haven’t read a play for a while (Shakespeare, perhaps?), the Book Club’s first dramatic work, Arcadia, will prove an absorbing and hilarious bringing together on stage of the past and the present. A witty and dazzling exploration of physics, mathematics, landscape architecture, Romantic poetry, botany, biology, and more, it opens in 1809 in an English country house with its Classical gardens designed by Capability Brown about to be redesigned in “picturesque” Romantic Gothic style. We meet the intellectually curious and brilliant 13-year-old Lady Thomasina Coverly and her tutor who just happens to be a friend of the poet Lord Byron. When the action shifts to the present time, we meet a writer and an academic trying to solve historical mysteries about the house and its inhabitants. Going back and forth between the centuries, Stoppard’s play actually enacts and illustrates its themes of time, of the difference between the Classical and Romantic temperaments, and of the disruptive influence of sex on our orbits in life—”the attraction [as one character puts it] which Newton left out.” (Available in all formats; 115 pages)
The link to register is https://forms.office.com/r/4EtLiP9ssv
The deadline to register is the Monday before the event at 8:00am. The Zoom link will be sent to registrants only.
If you have any questions, please contact the organizer – Linda Hutcheon at l.hutcheon@utoronto.ca.
