Amanda White leads a reading group around the novel The Old Woman and the Sea, which she adapted from Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea to feature a female protagonist.
Amanda White leads a reading group around the novel The Old Woman and the Sea, which she adapted from Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea to feature a female protagonist. Join us for discussion and debate: Will this slight but important shift change the story's human-nature narrative in interesting ways, generating new themes, metaphors, and meanings?
Copies of The Old Woman and the Sea will be available to registrants for pickup at Idea Exchange, Queen’s Square.
Artist’s Statement:
Rewriting the Wild is an ongoing project in which a series of novels featuring “man-vs-nature” conflict narratives are edited to have female protagonists. For Missing Pages, I am hosting a reading group around the novel The Old Woman and the Sea, adapted from The Old Man and the Sea, originally written by American author Ernest Hemingway and published in 1952. Winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1953, the original novel has become one of the classic novels of its genre in western literature.
As an artistic experiment, my project is concerned with generating discussion and debate; will this slight but important shift change the story's human-nature narrative in interesting ways? Will it generate new themes, metaphors, and meanings? Rewriting the Wild is both a socially engaged project that takes the shape of reading groups and book clubs, as well as a series of art objects, as feminist transformations of cultural artifacts.
The impulse to do this has developed naturally over the course of my current work and research which is centered around imaginings of nature and deconstructing dominant cultural narratives of human/nature relationships. Overall, this experiment attempts to invent a genre missing from the canon of Western literature. While contemporary feminist perspectives create a possible space for changing ideas about human-non-human relationships today, these new readings of classic fictions ask whether different kinds of historical relationships to nature might emerge via the female voice. This work is itself a form of fiction that imagines, what if these perspectives and voices had always been heard, what possible worlds could we live in now?
About the Artist
Amanda White (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of art, environment and culture, with a current focus on plant studies. She holds a PhD (Cultural Studies) from Queen’s University and a MFA (Visual Art) from the University of Windsor. She has exhibited and published her work with support from SSHRC, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council among others. Amanda’s ongoing research includes several studio-based works in progress as well as collaborative projects including a forthcoming co-edited book and a graphic novel. Amanda is currently a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Sustainable Curating in the department of Visual Arts at Western University. More info at: amandawhite.com
Image: Amanda White, The Old Woman and the Sea (cover), 2020, bookwork/multiple, 5 x 7 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
This event is part of Missing Pages a community-centric online project that makes space for voices that are underrepresented in our knowledge institutions. Public catalogues of stories—whether an archive, a university, or a library—are intended to tell us who we are. However, they undoubtedly omit and exclude experiences and knowledge. This series of online artworks and public programs focuses on personal and collective narratives that shape our communities, both locally and internationally, that are missing from collected records.
Virtual programming means we bring the programs directly to you – it’s all online! Join us virtually from the comfort of home.
Be inspired at Idea Exchange in Cambridge! Connect with the public libraries and public art galleries of Cambridge. Idea Exchange supports and inspires our community with an environment of discovery for people of all ages.
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