SEMINAR PROFILE

H15 -
An American Hero, Before and After: Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird and Go Set A Watchman

The publication of Harper Lee's Go Set A Watchman in July of 2015 came at a moment of newly intense racial strife in America, specifically strife over violence done to blacks by whites enforcing justice in the courts and on the streets. Given that To Kill A Mockingbird, both novel and film, center on the courageous race-blind defense of a falsely accused black man by Atticus Finch, who quickly became America's pre-eminent white fictional moral hero where race relations are concerned, shock and dismay greeted the revelation that Lee had earlier conceived Finch, in Go Set A Watchman, a first draft of To Kill A Mockingbird, as a Ku Klux Klan racist. Given that To Kill A Mockingbird is taught throughout the country as the story of how to heal and dispel racial strife, two problems have arisen for those teaching the book. One is literary: how much interpretive weight to give the first, ugly, portrait of Finch when thinking about the second saintly portrait of him. The second is related and is a matter of civic virtue and the role literature has in character formation in public education: what models of heroism are best suited to the contemporary American scene, can saints from the canon survive revision. This seminar will take up these and other topics relevant to a world in which the pieties of Atticus Finch might not square with the urgency of the claim "black lives matter."

Scholar:

Theo Theoharis

Location:

Harvard Hillel

Dates:

11/9/2015, 11/18/2015

H15 -	An American Hero, Before and After: Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird and Go Set A Watchman

	The publication of Harper Lee's Go Set A Watchman in July of 2015 came at a moment of newly intense racial strife in America, specifically strife over violence done to blacks by whites enforcing justice in the courts and on the streets. Given that To Kill A Mockingbird, both novel and film, center on the courageous race-blind defense of a falsely accused black man by Atticus Finch, who quickly became America's pre-eminent white fictional moral hero where race relations are concerned, shock and dismay greeted the revelation that Lee had earlier conceived Finch, in Go Set A Watchman, a first draft of To Kill A Mockingbird, as a Ku Klux Klan racist. Given that To Kill A Mockingbird is taught throughout the country as the story of how to heal and dispel racial strife, two problems have arisen for those teaching the book. One is literary: how much interpretive weight to give the first, ugly, portrait of Finch when thinking about the second saintly portrait of him. The second is related and is a matter of civic virtue and the role literature has in character formation in public education: what models of heroism are best suited to the contemporary American scene, can saints from the canon survive revision. This seminar will take up these and other topics relevant to a world in which the pieties of Atticus Finch might not square with the urgency of the claim "black lives matter."

		Scholar:	Theo Theoharis
		Location:	Harvard Hillel
		Dates:	11/9/2015, 11/18/2015