Announcing the 2016 Penn Reading Project and the Year of Media as Theme Year 2016-2017 |
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November 3, 2015, Volume 62, No. 12 |
Provost Vincent Price, Vice Provost for Education Beth Winkelstein, the Council of Undergraduate Deans and the Office of New Student Orientation and Academic Initiatives (NSOAI) are pleased to announce the Year of Media as the Provost’s Academic Theme Year for 2016-2017, and Orson Welles’ film, Citizen Kane, as the Penn Reading Project for 2016.
Penn Reading Project
This year is the 26th year of the Penn Reading Project (PRP), which was created as an introduction for incoming freshmen to academic life at Penn.
During New Student Orientation (August 25-29, 2016), the entire freshman class will gather in small groups with Penn faculty and senior academic administrators for a discussion of Citizen Kane. Immediately following the small group discussions, students will write an essay on the film; all PRP participants will also take part in a morning presentation on Citizen Kane and its themes.
Citizen Kane, released in 1941, is considered to be producer/director/star Orson Welles’ magnum opus, and it regularly tops lists of the greatest American films ever made. A fictionalized biography—of “Charles Foster Kane,” a character closely modeled on real-life newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst—Citizen Kane explores themes of power and media, including the importance of the news, how the news can be manipulated and how power shapes our leaders in both positive and negative ways. At the heart of Citizen Kane is a perhaps unanswerable question: Can we ever really interpret and understand a person’s life? In pursuit of an answer, Welles’ film famously switches the narrative among different observers, a technique that has had far-reaching resonance in later films.
Past Penn Reading Projects have included Langston Hughes’ The Big Sea, Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Adam Bradley’s Book of Rhymes, John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Narrative of the Life of Frederic Douglass and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia—as well as Thomas Eakins’ painting, The Gross Clinic. More information about the Penn Reading Project and its history can be found on the current Theme Year website: www.yearofdiscovery.org
Faculty members and senior academic administrators in all 12 Schools are invited to take part as PRP discussion leaders. You may sign up directly at www.prpleaders.org (If you have participated in the last few years, you can simply update your information.)
The Year of Media
Citizen Kane and the Penn Reading Project will open the Year of Media, devoted to exploring the theme of media across many areas of inquiry. A significant factor in the committee’s choice is Citizen Kane’s focus on news and newspapers, as well as politics, since 2016 is a Presidential election year. The fact that it is the first film chosen for the Penn Reading Project also reinforces the ever-growing prominence of media in academic discourse. We expect programming throughout the year to continue exploring these topics and others, including the evolving world of social media.
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Charles Foster Kane addresses the crowds in Citizen Kane. |
Penn’s academic theme years aim to provide a shared intellectual experience for the entire Penn community, with programming that is developed both centrally and in individual Schools and centers. NSOAI offers funding beginning July 1, 2016 to support theme year programs for the following year and invites current students, faculty and staff to design collaborative program opportunities across Penn’s campus and community. More information about applying for these grants will be available at www.themeyeargrants.org
Recommendations for Future Penn Reading Project Books and Theme Years
Penn Reading Projects and Academic Theme Years are selected by the Office of the Provost and the Council of Undergraduate Deans from nominations by members of the Penn community. NSOAI invites all current Penn students, faculty and staff to participate in the process at www.prpsuggestions.org
The PRP text should be an outstanding work that will form the basis for a lively discussion. PRP texts can be fiction or nonfiction, historical or contemporary. They can also be films, musical compositions and other works of art. When you submit your suggested text, explain why you think it will make a good PRP—and also suggest a theme year topic that arises from it. These topics should be broad in scope (e.g. Year of Media, Year of Discovery and Year of Proof) and encourage interdisciplinary exploration across all Penn Schools and centers.
Submissions can be made at any time, and will be reviewed by a nomination committee as they are submitted.
For more information, contact David Fox, director of Penn’s New Student Orientation and Academic Initiatives, at dfox@upenn.edu or (215) 573-5636. |
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