'A Moveable Feast' selected for the freshman reading project

A Moveable Feast has been chosen for the Class of 2000's Reading Project to orientate the incoming freshmen about vital aspects of the University -- the city, culture and, of course, Benjamin Franklin, who served as ambassador to Paris. Approximately 2,375 copies of the novel written by Ernest Hemingway are being distributed to students and faculty who will participate in discussions during the fall semester. Academic Programs in Residence Director Christopher Dennis said the Council of Undergraduate Deans chose the novel and is very excited about the selection,especially after last year's highly successful Arcadia. "A Moveable Feast was chosen mostly because it offers an insight into a city, like Philadelphia, as a site of creativity," Dennis explained. Residential Faculty Council and Steinberg Symposium Chairperson Robert Lucid, who is also an english professor, described the novel as a narrative about artists and travelers in Paris in the 1920s -- particularly Americans -- by one of the most famous of them. "The committee chose A Moveable Feast not simply because it is a very good and readable book by a very important artist," said Lucid. "But because it seemed -- especially to the students who were making the choice -- to be appropriate to people just entering their college education." According to Lucid, Hemingway's Paris represents the things that still matter to young people who are just starting out -- encountering new learning and the initiation rituals that go with it, while encountering as well the discovery of new community, new friends, new love and new loneliness. The novel was chosen from a pool of approximately 200 works. Its closest competitor was Robert Venturi's Complexity in Architecture. Dennis said that similar themes run through both works. The Residential Faculty Council formed the core of the project's planning group, but there were also two student representatives from the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education involved in the decision, Dennis said. Approximately 140 groups will be discussing A Moveable Feast September 1. "The Council is going to work throughout the summer on the follow-up to the project," Dennis said. "I think people are going to have a lot of fun with it." Some follow-up activities plan to take advantage of Philadelphia's culture, including the Cezanne exhibit that is at the Museum of Art, Dennis said. Additional activities will be coming from the Writer's House, whose organizers are discussing possibilities for celebrating the book, according to Lucid. Anyone interested in being involved with a Penn Reading Project discussion with the incoming freshmen should contact Dennis at 898-5551. A web site for the 1996-97 Reading Project is currently being constructed, Dennis said. "The idea of learning and the city was, in part, what led us to this text," Lucid said. "Penn, after all, is in a great city, and is more and more exploring undergraduate opportunities for study in great cities all over the world -- so that international studies and urban architectural studies offer attractive conjunctions."

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