Anna Barker’s Classics Reading Series

Each discussion is hosted in a Facebook Group, you do not need to have a Facebook account to access the groups.

Our current project:

100 Days of Charming Rotten Scoundrels

Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther
Pushkin: Eugene Onegin
Lermontov: The Hero of Our Time
Turgenev: Fathers and Sons

Past books

100 Days of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina 

100-ish Days of Lord Byron

30 Days of Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary

100 Days of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables

100 Days of Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo

50 Days of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black

10 Days of Balzac’s Colonel Chabert

10 Days of Gilgamesh

50 Days of Paradise Lost

100 Days of The Brothers Karamazov

100 Days of War and Peace

100 Days of Decameron

 

Anna Barker received her Ph. D. in Comparative Literature in 2002 with a dissertation in translation studies. At the University of Iowa she has taught courses in the English Department, in Cinema and Comparative Literature, and in Asian and Slavic Languages. She has translated the works of numerous International Writing Program writers, and several of her translations have appeared in 91st Meridian and International Accents. Her essay on Helen Maria Willims’ translation of Paul and Virginia will appear in Women and Translation (University of Ottawa Press, 2010). Her areas of interest include translation, 19th-century European and American literature, and women writers. In recent years, she has regularly taught the authors course “Tolstoy and Dostoevsky,” organizing, in fall 2010, a campus-community celebration to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Tolstoy’s death. The celebration featured an open-air reading of Anna Karenina (all 816 pages) in downtown Iowa City over four days with dozens of participants.


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