John Cabot University

Agenda
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Introductions
About John Cabot University
Italy Reads Program Details
Overview of biographical details about the author
and The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
◦ Lunch
◦ Introduction to Film & Viewing: The Namesake
(directed by Mira Nair, 2006)
 John
Cabot University, founded in
1972, is an independent, fouryear liberal arts American
university offering undergraduate
degrees and study abroad
programs to English-speaking
students from all over the world.
 John
Cabot University, the first
accredited American overseas
liberal arts university in Italy, is
accredited by the Commission on
Higher Education of the Middle
States Association of Colleges and
Schools.
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Faculty: 100 faculty members with over 75
percent of non-language instructors holding
PhDs, JDs, and MFAs from some of the world’s
most prestigious institutions.
Students: 900-1000 students from 40 countries
including visiting students from prestigious
universities across the United States; average
class size of 15.
Location: JCU has two campus, both in
Trastevere; one on Via della Lungara and one on
the Lungotevere Raffaello Sanzio.
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Began in 2009 with a grant from the
U.S. National Endowment for the Arts
for a “Big Read” program.
The success of The Big Read Rome led
John Cabot University to expand this
American cultural exchange program to
a wider Italian high school community
and create our own program which we
called Italy Reads.

To provide high school teachers, book
groups, and individual readers with the
resources to read and consider the
significance of great works of American
literature and to encourage cultural
exchange between the United States of
America and English speakers in Italy
through the discussion of American
literature.
Dr. Carlos Dews, Associate Professor of
English and Italy Reads Program Director

Ms. Gina Spinelli, Italy Reads Goddess &
Coordinator
Ms. Alexandra Summers,
Italy Reads Student Assistant &
Coordinator of Moodle Course
Ms. Lavinia Giannoni, Assistant
Student Assistant
Ms. Livia Piotto, Reference Librarian,
John Cabot University’s Frohring Library
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“
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Participating teachers and their students
will be invited to the Italy Reads Keynote
Address:
6 November 2013, Wednesday, 7:00 p.m. 8:30 p.m., Keynote Address by Pulitzer
Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, Aula
Magna, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus,
Via della Lungara 233 (Trastevere).
Participating teachers are invited to a
teacher- training workshop with author
Jhumpa Lahiri:
pm
7 November 2013,Thursday,7:00 – 8:30
Workshop for Teachers, Aula Magna, John
Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via
della Lungara 233 (Trastevere).
Italy Reads participating teachers and students may
reserve a free group screening of director Mira
Nair’s 2006 film adaptation of The Namesake.
JCU Italy Reads Volunteers will be invited to
participate in post-screening discussions. To
arrange for a screening of the film, please contact
Ms. Gina Marie Spinelli at
italyreads@johncabot.edu.
A DVD of the adaptation will also be available to participating
teachers and book group leaders. Contact Ms. Gina Spinelli.
Participating teachers and their students will
receive discounted tickets to the English
Theatre of Rome’s production of Under the
Overcoat, a theatrical adaptation of The
Namesake.
Performances of the play will be presented in
November and will include nighttime and
matinee presentations. See the Calendar of
Events section of the Italy Reads website for
days and times.
One of the key elements of Italy Reads is
the interaction between JCU student
volunteers and participating high school
students. John Cabot University students
will be available to visit schools to lead
discussions of the novel in a student
exchange program or students can visit
JCU for a discussion of the play with our
volunteers. To arrange for a student
exchange please contact Ms. Gina Spinelli.
Participating teachers and book group
leaders can take part in a day-long
workshop about the novel, Italy Reads
programs, and the use of the materials
provided by Italy Reads. If you are reading
this slide you are participating in just such a
training workshop!
Through the Italy Reads website, teachers
participating in Italy Reads have access to a
wealth of supplemental electronic materials
related to the novel. See the Resources
section of the Italy Reads website:
http://www.johncabot.edu/about_jcu/italyreads/resources-for-teachers.aspx
Through the Italy Reads website, book
groups participating in Italy Reads have
access to a wealth of supplemental
electronic materials related to the novel
and may be able to arrange lecture sessions
with their groups.
See Resources section, Italy Reads Website.
Participating libraries can receive a limited
number of free copies of the official edition
of The Namesake. Contact Ms. Gina Spinelli
to request copies.
Teachers registered as official participants
in Italy Reads 2013 will receive a free copy
of The Namesake.
Students are encouraged to participate in
the Italy Reads Student Video Contest.
Students may produce videos that
creatively represent the themes explored
in the novel and submit the videos for
judging by a panel of experts.
1st Prize: €500, 2nd Prize: €300
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Students are encouraged to produce videos
that are inspired by the novel. The themes
of the novel include: cultural and personal
identity, assimilation, family and
relationships, tradition, coming of age, what
it means to be a foreigner, love and other
themes.
These videos can include music videos, a
dramatized scene from the novel, a
documentary consideration of one of the
themes of the novel, or an impressionistic
video in response to one of the themes.
There can be no violation of copyright in
the videos. Students are encouraged to be
creative and innovative in their
interpretation of one of the themes in their
videos.
“Two Sides of a Dream” submitted by students of
the V-B and their teacher Fortuna Pappalardo at
Liceo Scientifico Statale 'Innocenzo XII'. Judges
commented, “This is hands-down the winner . . .
They adapted the story in order to address a
contemporary response to Gatsby and they did it
with excellent production values, solid acting
(particularly for non-native speakers of English),
and editing that was well-paced.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ73AhRvImA
&feature=youtu.be
“The Great Gatsby” submitted by students of
the 9th year and their teacher Anna Madden at
St. George's British International School Rome.
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Nhk3LJy
B7I&feature
“Shadows of a Page”, submitted by students of
the 12th year and their teacher Anna Madden at
St. George's British International School Rome.
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itxE3fQR0
K0
All students who appear in a video submitted to
compete in the video contest must be from the
same class at the same school. Classes are
encouraged to submit multiple entries. Video
recordings can be taken either using mobile
telephones or video cameras.
Submissions must be received by the deadline of
4:00 p.m. Monday, 20 January 2014.
For complete Contest Rules see the Italy Reads
website.
Opportunities for Italian
high school students to
submit articles about Italy
Reads 2013 in English or
Italian to Zai.net student
magazine. For more
information contact Gina
Spinelli or see
www.zai.net
Jhumpa Lahiri was born in 1967 in London, and grew up in
Rhode Island. She has travelled several times to India,
where both her parents were born and raised. She
graduated with a B.A. in English literature from Barnard
College. As a child, she wrote extensive 'novels' in
notebooks, sometimes in collaboration with friends. She
wrote for her school newspaper, but had stopped writing
fiction by the time she went to college. She applied to
several graduate English programs but was rejected from
all of them. While waiting to apply again, she took a job as
a research assistant at a non-profit institution in
Cambridge.
(www.sawnet.org)
LAHIRI IN HER OWN WORDS:
“For the first time I had a computer of my own at my
desk, and I started writing fiction again, more seriously. I
used to stay late and come in [early] to work on stories.
Eventually I had enough material to apply to the creative
writing program at Boston University. But once that
ended, unsure of what to do next, I went on to graduate
school and got my Ph.D. In the process, it became clear
to me that I was not meant to be a scholar. It was
something I did out of a sense of duty and practicality,
but it was never something I loved.”
(www.sawnet.com)
“I still wrote stories on the side, publishing
things here and there. The year I finished
my dissertation, I was also accepted to the
Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown,
and that changed everything. It was
something of a miracle. In seven months I
got an agent, sold a book, and had a story
published in The New Yorker. I've been
extremely lucky. It's been the happiest
possible ending.”
(www.sawnet.org)
Among the first received in 1999 was the
PEN/Hemingway award for the best fiction debut of
the year. The title story, “Interpreter of Maladies,”
was chosen for the O Henry Award for best American
short stories. Lahiri was a recipient of the
Transatlantic Review award from Henfield Foundation
and the fiction prize from Louisville Review. The New
Yorker has published three of her stories and named
her as “one of the 20 best writers under the age of
40.”

www.postcolonialstudies.emory.edu/jhumpalahiri/
Eventually, Lahiri did enter Boston University, and received
an M.A. in English, an M.A. in Creative Writing, and an
M.A. in Comparative Literature and the Arts, and a Ph.D. in
Renaissance Studies.
She currently sits on the President’s Committee on the
Arts and Humanities under Barack Obama. For the time
being, Lahiri lives in Rome, Italy, with her family.
Read More:http://postcolonialstudies.emory.edu/jhumpalahiri/#ixzz2UFAQCI7z

Her novel The
Namesake was a
New York Times
Notable Book, a Los
Angeles Times Book
Prize finalist and
was selected as one
of the best books of
the year by USA
Today and
Entertainment
Weekly, among
others.

The Namesake follows the Ganguli family
through its journey from Calcutta to Cambridge
to the Boston suburbs. Ashima and Ashoke
Ganguli arrive in America at the end of the
1960s, shortly after their arranged marriage in
Calcutta, in order for Ashoke to finish his
engineering degree at MIT. Ashoke is forwardthinking, ready to enter into American culture if
not fully at least with an open mind. His young
bride is far less malleable. Isolated, desperately
missing her large family back in India, she will
never be at peace with this new world.
(www.randomhouse.com)
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Soon after they arrive in Cambridge, their first child is born, a
boy. According to Indian custom, the child will be given two
names: an official name, to be bestowed by the greatgrandmother, and a pet name to be used only by family. But
the letter from India with the child's official name never
arrives, and so the baby's parents decide on a pet name to
use for the time being. Ashoke chooses a name that has
particular significance for him: on a train trip back in India
several years earlier, he had been reading a short story
collection by one of his most beloved Russian writers, Nikolai
Gogol, when the train derailed in the middle of the night,
killing almost all the sleeping passengers onboard. Ashoke
had stayed awake to read his Gogol, and he believes the book
saved his life. His child will be known, then, as Gogol.
Identity & Geography:
Migration, Assimilation, Tradition
Cross-Culturalism
Loneliness / Isolation / Loss
The search for & meaning of “home”
Family & Relationships:
Childhood
Parenthood
Coming of Age
Love
As author Jaydeep Sarangi explains, "Jhumpa
Lahiri's stories are the gateways into the
large submerged territory of 'crossculturalism'. [Her work operates as] a
metaphor to share cultures. . .something that
will allow them/us to share, instead of
dividing, what is on either side" (117).
As a popular young writer of Indian
background, Lahiri is a sort of representative
figure for non-immigrant Americans [and
readers from all nations] who do not fully
understand what it means to straddle the line
between two cultures.

http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/lahiri_jhumpa.php
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Although [Lahiri’s family] have lived in the United
States for more than thirty years, Lahiri observes
that her parents retain “a sense of emotional
exile” and Lahiri herself grew up with “conflicting
expectations…to be Indian by Indians and
American by Americans.” Lahiri's abilities to
convey the oldest cultural conflicts in the most
immediate fashion and to achieve the voices of
many different characters are among the unique
qualities that have captured the attention of a
wide audience.
 http://barclayagency.com/lahiri.html
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From early on, she was conscious of her
family's distance from the American life that
was claiming her. [Lahiri states] "I felt intense
pressure to be two things," she wrote in
2006, "loyal to the old world and fluent in the
new . . . But my perception as a young girl
was that I fell short at both ends."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/
21/saturdayreviewsfeatres.guardianreview5
Author Judith Caesar reasons that, "Americans can
learn about themselves and create a richer system of
values as a result of encountering the other foreign
customs and ways of thinking of the Indian
characters -sometimes without even fully realizing
what they have come to understand or the
opportunity they have missed" (90). But in some
ways Lahiri herself struggles to understand Indian
culture. In an interview with India-West, Lahiri
admits: "I'm lucky that I'm between two worlds. . .I
don't really know what a distinct South Asian identity
means. I don't think about that when I write, I just try
to bring a person to life" (Tsering B1).
http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/lahiri_jhumpa.php
"When I was growing up in the 1970s," she says,
perched at the end of an enormous table in her British
publisher's offices, "India was an unknown thing for
most Americans. I felt that it was basically like the
moon to them." Her family's regular trips to Calcutta
earned her pitying looks from teachers and
schoolfriends: "Like, 'Oh, your parents drag you all the
way to India, how scary must that be?' And it was
impossible to explain because there was nothing in the
culture. There were no Indian restaurants, there was no
Indian anything. Indians were a very discreet presence
in those times.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/21/satu
rdayreviewsfeatres.guardianreview5
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Both Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake
contain themes of conflict in relationships
between couples, families, and friends. Through
these relationships she explores ideas of
isolation and identity, both personal and cultural.
The characters in both works frequently
encounter crises of identity, which are tied to
their inabilities to reconcile their American
identity with their Indian identity. Particularly in
the short fiction of Interpreter of Maladies, Lahiri
often leaves these crises unresolved.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/21/
saturdayreviewsfeatres.guardianreview5
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Writer Nalini Iyer feels, "Lahiri's strength as a
story teller is characterization. The people she
creates are real, alive, complicated, and
individual. She never descends into stereotypes
nor does she engage in grand generalizations
about social and political relationships. Instead,
she sweeps her reader through a range of
emotions and experiences and lets her characters
speak for themselves" (7).
http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/lahiri_jhu
mpa.php
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"But nothing feels normal to Ashima. For the past 18
months, ever since she's arrived in Cambridge, nothing
has felt normal at all. It's not so much the pain, which she
knows somehow she will survive; it's the consequence,
motherhood in a foreign land. For it was one thing to be
pregnant, to suffer the queasy mornings in bed, the
sleepness nights, the dull throbbing in her back, the
countless visits to the bathroom.
Throughout the experience, in spite of her growing
discomfort, she had been astonished by her body's ability
to make life exactly as her mother and her grandmother
and all her great- grandmothers had done. That it was
happening so far from home, unmonitored and
unobserved by those she loved, had made it more
miraculous still. But she is terrified to raise a child in a
country where she is related to no one, where she knows
so little, where life seems so tentative and spare."

JEFFREY BROWN: So identity is a big theme, in terms of
being between two cultures, but also literally the idea of
our names, the name of the book, "The Namesake.”

JHUMPA LAHIRI: Yes.
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JEFFREY BROWN: Tell me what's going on with that.

JHUMPA LAHIRI: Oh, so many things. The whole book sort
of grew out of a name, grew out of a particular name,
Gogol, the last name of the great Russian writer Nikolai
Gogol. And this name belonged to a young friend of one of
my cousins in Calcutta.
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I had always been aware of having an unusual
name and the difficulties one faces living with a
name in a place where it doesn't make sense or
where it's, you know, unknown. But I started to
think about why names meant what they did,
depending on where we were, just sort of the
relationship between identity and geography.
And the book just kind of grew out of meditating
on those ideas.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment
/july-dec03/lahiri_10-16.html
Terry Gross and the author discuss the novel
The Namesake, the difficulty of writing, and the
implications of the Pulitzer Prize:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.ph
p?storyId=1420143
The Namesake arrived, in preliminary form, a few
months after September 11, when I was a few
months pregnant, in my first apartment on
Prospect Park West. At the time I was struggling
with another project. One day I pulled a binder off
a shelf and looked at some abandoned chapters
inside.
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/10/local/one-decade-in-brooklyn
In the quiet of that apartment, which had felt so immense when
we first moved in that my husband and I used to amuse
ourselves, speaking to one another from different rooms and not
hearing what one another said, I began to see the future of a
book I thought was not meant to be, and to resurrect an idea I
thought had died, printing out a slender but complete draft by
winter. The desk at which I sat, the only real desk that, all these
years later, I continue to own, was salvaged from the basement
of that apartment. Like the manuscript itself, it was something
cast aside, something neglected, which I felt compelled to put to
use.
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/10/local/one-decade-in-brooklyn
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Q. In the new book, you explain that all Bengalis have private pet
names and public ''good names.'' But the main character in ''The
Namesake'’ is given only one name: Gogol, after the Russian writer.
A. That happened to me. My name, Jhumpa, which is my only name
now, was supposed to be my pet name. My parents tried to enroll
me in school under my good name, but the teacher asked if they had
anything shorter. Even now, people in India ask why I'm publishing
under my pet name instead of a real name.
Q. What does Jhumpa mean?
A. Jhumpa has no meaning. It always upset me. It's like jhuma, which
refers to the sound of a child's rattle, but with a ''p.'' In this country,
you'd never name your child Rattle. I actually have two good names,
Nilanjana and Sudeshna. My mother couldn't decide. All three are on
the birth certificate. I never knew how to write my name.
Q. You've said that despite living virtually all your life in
the
States, you still find it hard to think of yourself as an
American. Why?
A. Mainly because my parents didn't think of themselves
as American. You inherit that idea of where you're from. So
calling myself an American would have been a betrayal. I
continue to be hesitant to call myself an American, but I
also feel hesitant to call myself anything else.
Q. So you're not comfortable calling yourself an Indian,
either?
A. No, no. My parents told me I was an Indian, but going to
India as a child made it apparent that I simply did not have
a claim to either country. In the eyes of Indians who never
left, I'm not an Indian at all.

For complete interview see:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/07/magazine/the-way-we-live-now-9-703-questions-for-jhumpa-lahiri-crossing-over.html
Please join us for a Bengali-(and The
Namesake)-inspired lunch!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK2OuTOl
Nhg
Color is the stuff of life in the movies of Mira Nair, the Indian-born
director whose newest film, “The Namesake,” follows two generations
of a Bengali family from late-1970s Calcutta to New York City. Her
lush palette lends her films a throbbing physicality that invites you to
step into the screen and embrace the sensuous here and now.
The story of upwardly mobile immigrants torn between tradition and
modernity as they are absorbed into the American melting pot has
been told in countless movies.
This variation is gentle and compassionate. The longing for roots of
these displaced middle-class Indians lends a soulful undertow to a film
conspicuously lacking in melodrama.
http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/03/09/movies/09name.html
The film has a crackling star performance by Kal
Penn (from the clever trash comedy “Harold and
Kumar Go to White Castle”), who brings an
offhanded charisma to the role of Gogol, the firstborn child of Ashima (Tabu), a classically trained
singer, and Ashoke Ganguli (Irrfan Khan), an
aspiring engineer, who move to America in 1977
after their arranged marriage in Calcutta.

http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/03/09/movies
/09name.html
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In high school Gogol rebels from his family and
behaves like a typical pot-smoking, rock-’n’roll-loving American teenager. On a visit to
Calcutta he sneers at Indian ways. After studying
architecture at Yale, he falls in love with Maxine
(Jacinda Barrett), a stereotypical blonde WASP
princess from Long Island. Cultural tensions flare
when he brings her home to meet his family, and
the couple are expected to withhold any
expressions of physical affection, according to
Indian tradition.
http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/03/09/movies
/09name.html
Gogol eventually falls in love
with Moushumi (Zuleikha
Robinson), a beautiful
Bengali woman who lived a
freewheeling life in Paris
before coming to the United
States. His female
counterpart, she is as
culturally confused as he is,
and the relationship runs
into trouble.

http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/
03/09/movies/09name.html
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http://www.nytimes
.com/slideshow/20
07/03/08/movies/
20070309_NAMESA
KE_SLIDESHOW_1.ht
ml
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http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0433416/?ref_
=sr_1
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http://www.johncabot.edu/about_jcu/italy-reads/resources-for-teachers.aspx
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ73AhRvImA&feature=youtu.be
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Nhk3LJyB7I&feature
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itxE3fQR0K0
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK2OuTOlNhg
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http://www.sawnet.org
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http://randomhouse.com
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http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/lahiri_jhumpa.php
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http://barclayagency.com/lahiri.html
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/21/saturdayreviewsfeatres.guardianreview5
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http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july-dec03/lahiri_10-16.html
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http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1420143
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http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/10/local/one-decade-in-brooklyn
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK2OuTOlNhg
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http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/03/09/movies/09name.html
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http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0433416/?ref_=sr_1
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www.nytimes.com/2003/09/07/magazine/the-way-we-live-now-9-7-03-questions-for-jhumpa-lahiri-crossing-over.html
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www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/03/08/movies/20070309_NAMESAKE_SLIDESHOW_1.html