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Club de lectura virtual en anglès amb Klára Kodetová. Primavera 2025
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Klára Kodetová és llicenciada en Història i Filologia Anglesa per la Universitat de Carles de Praga i té un màster en Estudis culturals per la Universitat de Barcelona i de Professorat per la Universitat Pompeu Fabra. És professora d’anglès i també tutora en la UNED Barcelona d’assignatures de Literatura Nord-americana i Mons anglòfons.
#Llegim
:: ABRIL
Atonement by Ian McEwan. London : Vintage, 2007.
On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge.
By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.
:: MAIG
Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith. London: Vintage, 1999.
"For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there's no one like Patricia Highsmith." —Time
The world of Patricia Highsmith has always been filled with ordinary people, all of whom are capable of very ordinary crimes. This theme was present from the beginning, when her debut, Strangers on a Train, galvanized the reading public. Here we encounter Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno, passengers on the same train. But while Guy is a successful architect in the midst of a divorce, Bruno turns out to be a sadistic psychopath who manipulates Guy into swapping murders with him. "Some people are better off dead," Bruno remarks, "like your wife and my father, for instance." As Bruno carries out his twisted plan, Guy is trapped in Highsmith's perilous world, where, under the right circumstances, anybody is capable of murder.
The inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's classic 1951 film, Strangers on a Train launched Highsmith on a prolific career of noir fiction, proving her a master at depicting the unsettling forces that tremble beneath the surface of everyday contemporary life.
:: JUNY
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. London : Penguin Books, 2017.
In 1855, Walt Whitman published — at his own expense — the first edition of Leaves of Grass, a visionary volume of twelve poems. Showing the influence of a uniquely American form of mysticism known as Transcendentalism, which eschewed the general society and culture of the time, the writing is distinguished by an explosively innovative free verse style and previously unmentionable subject matter. Exalting nature, celebrating the human body, and praising the senses and sexual love, the monumental work was condemned as "immoral." Whitman continued evolving Leaves of Grass despite the controversy, growing his influential work decades after its first appearance by adding new poems with each new printing.
Abraham Lincoln read it with approval, but Emily Dickinson described its bold language and themes as 'disgraceful.' And Ralph Waldo Emerson found Leaves of Grass 'the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed,' calling it a 'combination of the Bhagavad Gita and the New York Herald.' Published at the author's own expense on July 4, 1855, Leaves of Grass initially consisted of a preface, twelve untitled poems in free verse (including the work later titled 'Song of Myself' which Malcolm Cowley called 'one of the great poems of modern times'), and a now-famous portrait of a devil-may-care Walt Whitman in a workman's shirt. Over the next four decades,
Whitman continually expanded and revised the book as he took on the role of a workingman's bard who championed American nationalism, political democracy, contemporary progress, and unashamed sex. The final 'Deathbed Edition' published in 1892 contained 383 poems.