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I have had several Salon folks recommend Wittenberg to me and I plan to see it this week: the idea of Hamlet being pulled between two professors, Martin Luther and Dr. Faustus, and having to choose between the life of the mind or the salvation of the soul resonates with the current Salon study of Dante’s Paradiso and the upcoming Hamlet study. Also excited about the National Theatre’s readings of passages of the King James Bible coming up in November and October…until we get to the Bible as Literature Salon, this should satisfy.

This article titled “Wittenberg – review” was written by Lyn Gardner, for The Guardian on Thursday 1st September 2011 22.01 UTC

The classic American campus drama gets a makeover in David Davalos‘s spry, old-fashioned comedy, in which the traditional liberal US college is substituted for the Catholic University of Wittenberg circa 1517. It was a time of new ideas, including those of the Polish astronomer Copernicus, challenging existing beliefs. Think Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers meets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and you have a taste of this smart-arse evening, in which Davalos doesn’t just wear his learning on his sleeve but plasters it all over the stage.

Something is rotten in the papal states. The pope is busy flogging off indulgences to fund his building projects. But at Wittenberg, the professor of theology, Martin Luther (Andrew Frame), still keeps the faith despite his frustrations: a severe case of constipation and constant needling from fellow academic Dr Faustus (Sean Campion). Faustus is the professor of philosophy who believes in free will and practises a little psychoanalysis on the side. We may all go to the devil, but at least we can do it thinkingly. Or maybe crooning: Faustus has a weekly gig singing at the local tavern, The Bunghole; Que Sera Sera is his theme tune. Into the mix comes Hamlet (Edward Franklin), prince of Denmark and college tennis champion, back for his senior year and in a teenage dither. Will Faustus win the confused young man’s mind, or can Luther win his soul?

In the pot, Davalos throws fiction and fact, real historical figures and those from literature, and with Tiggerish enthusiasm gives it a stir. The japes come thick and fast. Who really nailed Luther’s 95 theses to that church door? Will it be Hamlet or Laertes who is the victor in the Wittenberg versus Paris college tennis tournament? How many Poles does it take to make the world go round? It’s ticklish fun, but slightly exhausting, and so busy showing off that it almost entirely forgets to be about anything substantial.

The stand-off between faith and reason never materialises, either intellectually or dramatically, because Davalos is always heading off in search of the next joke. This is an evening that can take nothing seriously: not even the meaning of life. Christopher Hayden’s production has the brio to match the script, and there are terrific performances all round, but although I laughed and enjoyed the literary references and academic in-jokes, the earth never moved for me.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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The results of this study are not surprising; during the delicious first session on To the Lighthouse today many noted that the book makes the reader more attentive to the nuances of communication and relationships. The act of reading literature widens an individuals’ life experience as travel and friendships do–though literature may offer more diversity as the journey is in time as well as place and the minds of others. Read..talk about what you have read…widen your heart.

This article titled “Reading fiction ‘improves empathy’, study finds” was written by Alison Flood, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 7th September 2011 12.27 UTC

Burying your head in a novel isn’t just a way to escape the world: psychologists are increasingly finding that reading can affect our personalities. A trip into the world of Stephenie Meyer, for example, actually makes us feel like vampires.

Researchers from the University at Buffalo gave 140 undergraduates passages from either Meyer’s Twilight or JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to read, with the vampire group delving into an extract in which Edward Cullen tells his teenage love interest Bella what it is like to be a vampire, and the wizardly readers getting a section in which Harry and his cohorts are “sorted” into Hogwarts houses.

The candidates then went through a series of tests, in which they categorised “me” words (myself, mine) and “wizard” words (wand, broomstick, spells, potions) by pressing one key when they appeared on the screen, and “not me” words (they, theirs) and “vampire” words (blood, undead, fangs, bitten) by pressing another key, with the test then reversed. The study’s authors, Dr Shira Gabriel and Ariana Young, expected them to respond more quickly to the “me” words when they were linked to the book they had just read.

Gabriel and Young then applied what they dubbed the Twilight/Harry Potter Narrative Collective Assimilation Scale, which saw the students asked questions designed to measure their identification with the worlds they had been reading about – including “How long could you go without sleep?”, “How sharp are your teeth?” and “Do you think, if you tried really hard, you might be able to make an object move just using the power of your mind?” Their moods, life satisfaction, and absorption into the stories were then measured.

Published by the journal Psychological Science, the study found that participants who read the Harry Potter chapters self-identified as wizards, whereas participants who read the Twilight chapter self-identified as vampires. And “belonging” to these fictional communities actually provided the same mood and life satisfaction people get from affiliations with real-life groups. “The current research suggests that books give readers more than an opportunity to tune out and submerge themselves in fantasy worlds. Books provide the opportunity for social connection and the blissful calm that comes from becoming a part of something larger than oneself for a precious, fleeting moment,” Gabriel and Young write.

“My study definitely points to reading fulfilling a fundamental need – the need for social connection,” Gabriel said. She is currently trying to replicate the study with schoolchildren – using jedis versus wizards.

The psychology of fiction is a small but growing area of research, according to Keith Oatley, a professor in the department of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto and a published novelist himself, who details the latest findings in the area in his online magazine, OnFiction.

One of his own studies, carried out in 2008, gave 166 participants either the Chekhov short story, The Lady with the Little Dog, or a version of the story rewritten in documentary form. The subjects’ personality traits and emotions were assessed before and after reading, with those who were given the Chekhov story in its unadulterated form found to have gone through greater changes in personality – empathising with the characters and thus becoming a little more like them.

“I think the reason fiction but not non-fiction has the effect of improving empathy is because fiction is primarily about selves interacting with other selves in the social world,” said Oatley. “The subject matter of fiction is constantly about why she did this, or if that’s the case what should he do now, and so on. With fiction we enter into a world in which this way of thinking predominates. We can think about it in terms of the psychological concept of expertise. If I read fiction, this kind of social thinking is what I get better at. If I read genetics or astronomy, I get more expert at genetics or astronomy. In fiction, also, we are able to understand characters’ actions from their interior point of view, by entering into their situations and minds, rather than the more exterior view of them that we usually have. And it turns out that psychologically there is a big difference between these two points of view. We usually take the exterior view of others, but that’s too limited.”

The findings could, Oatley believes, have significant implications, particularly in a climate where arts funding is under threat. “It is the first empirical finding, so far as I know, to show a clear psychological effect of reading fiction,” he said. “It’s a result that shows that reading fiction improves understanding of others, and this has a very basic importance in society, not just in the general way making the world a better place by improving interpersonal understanding, but in specific areas such as politics, business, and education. In an era when high-school and university subjects are evaluated economically, our results do have economic implications.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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Very many thanks for last night’s marathon – and indeed for the last few months guidance through the intricacies and bewilderment of Ulysses. I know I would never have undertaken the journey by myself and your company and constant enthusiasm and insights (as well as those of the rest of my fellow ‘trekkers’) made the journey, which would have been unbearably lonely, not exactly easy but certainly worth continuing!

I cannot fathom that we are done. I think I will need to reread this final section to get a fuller appreciation; I need to check my own expectations at the door and let the language and the rhythm wash over me fully. …And it goes without saying a hundred thank yous to you for all that you do. I cannot tell you what it means to me being a part of the salon…

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I never would have read Ulysses but am very glad that I have. It was frustrating, moving, enigmatic, and uplifting — and that was just the first page. It — and the salon — were also a gift for me this year. Life has been challenging, to say the least, and the Salon was a pocket of time when everything else went away. It was a rare moment in which I was truly immersed in the here and now. And that doesn’t seem to happen much these days. You led the group with a deft hand — guiding but never directing. It’s a rare gift and one that you have in spades.

My experience of the Ulysses sessions is very positive. I would not have got this from reading it alone. (I had already tried and given up.) I appreciated the small size of the group and felt comfortable with the other members. We were all focused, it seemed to me, in much the same way, even if our views often differed – which, of course, was what was so challenging and stimulating. You, Toby, created a supportive environment for ideas to be exchanged and developed – it was a creative time, and I would often leave your house with a feeling of elation.

I liked the structure of the sessions. Fees? At first it seemed a lot to pay out – considering how many sessions there would be – but now I think that it was worth every penny!

What matters is that I have read, and hugely enjoyed reading, Ulysses. And I look forward to reading it again …

The Salon is a place for the meeting of minds- to connect, to agree and disagree and to use books as a means through which to ponder the various aspects of human existence and experience in all of its messy glory.
It’s the cornerstone of my intellectual world and it’s terrific fun as well!