April Literary Lectures

Ladies and Gentlemen

Please find information about Weill-Cornell Medical College in Qatar and their up-and-coming literary lectures series stating next week. The general public are most welcome. Lectures start at 6:00PM and food will be provided.

regards

Rodney Sharkey
Humanities
Weill-Cornell Medical College Qatar

Telephone: +974 492 8225
Fax: +974 492 8222
Mobile: +974 5233513
http://www.qatar-med.cornell.edu

PLACE: Lecture Hall 4 WCMC-Q.

Tuesday April 6th 2010

“From Odysseus to Aeneas:” The Journey Home.

Rodney Sharkey, Ph.D.

Plagued by the omnipotent shadow of James Joyce in all of his own fictive writing attempts, Rodney Sharkey finally found his way into the light by shamelessly stealing the structure of Ulysses and setting his own novel – The Journey Home – on the 16th June 2004. In this way, the themes and concerns of Joyce’s great novel are reexamined once more, one hundred years later.

Wednesday April 14th 2010

The Job

Ian Patrick Miller, MFA.

Coming to terms with his own death (an event so far unexplained), Ian Miller is faced with a question—was his life botched by his relationship with Time? Further, can he, as a dead narrator, redefine the acts of his living for an audience he failed to find while alive? “The Job,” a selection from a postmortal work-in-progress, explores one writer’s attempt to conceptualize the nature of time and provide meaning to his former existence.

Wednesday April 21st 2010

A Great and Terrible Light

Autumn Watts, MFA.

In Autumn’s work in progress, Frank Abernathy abandons his wealthy, controlling family in West Virginia to escape an unwelcome marriage in 1921. He pursues his destiny in the mythic West, but winds up disowned and impoverished in a Nevada mining camp. There he meets Margaret: an unlikely brothel worker with a disappeared husband. Their unconventional love affair begins a longer story that will span three generations of a family closely entwined with the rise and fall of Nevada's nuclear testing era.

Wednesday April 28th 2010

The Near Absence of Blood

Mary Ann Rishel, Ph. D.

Mary Ann Rishel will read from her novel in progress, The Near Absence of Blood, a murder mystery that introduces the deductive logic of western reasoning to the multicultural logic of Doha, Qatar. The newly-arrived US expat and Assistant Professor in the Humanities Marty Stash and her brilliant Qatari student Noura Al Jazi investigate a death that leads them from the riches of luxurious West Bay to the clamour of the Industrial Area to the ivy of Education City as they explore evidence in the crime empirically and otherwise and confront the limits of human thought.