The American Dream: One Day University Film and Book Series

Renowned Bard College Professor Joseph Luzzi couldn’t decide what he loves to teach more, literature or film. So we decided he wouldn’t have to choose! The theme of this first-time-ever series is The American Dream, which will explore the opportunity for prosperity, success, and upward social mobility achieved through hard work in a society that prides itself on its dynamism. That theme is reflected in two books and two films chosen by Professor Luzzi: one older book and film (released more than 10 years ago), and a second more recent book and film combination (each less than 2 years old).

Sunday, March 5:  10am – 1pm
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FILM ONE: Brooklyn is a 2015 British-Canadian-Irish romantic drama starring Saoirse Ronan, Emory Cohen, Domhnall Gleeson, Jim Broadbent, and Julie Walters. Set in the early 1950s, the film tells the story of a young Irish woman’s immigration to Brooklyn, where she quickly falls in love. When her past catches up with her, she must choose between her home country and the New World, and the lives that exist within them. Brooklyn premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim and was nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay.

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BOOK ONE: Purity is a magnum opus for our morally complex times, written by multiple New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Franzen. Young Pip Tyler doesn’t know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she’s saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she’s squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother—her only family—is hazardous. But she doesn’t have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she’ll ever have a normal life. It takes a chance encounter with two visitors from Germany to send the reader on a journey of discovery that ranges from Stasi-era East Berlin to a rainforest in Bolivia—and from the ancient war between the sexes to the present-day bewilderments of the Internet.

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FILM TWO: Little Miss Sunshine is a 2006 American comedy-drama road film that stars Greg Kinnear, Steve Carell, Toni Collette, Paul Dano, Abigail Breslin, and Alan Arkin. It was produced by on a budget of just $8,000,000, but when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival its distribution rights were bought by Fox Searchlight Pictures for one of the biggest deals made in the history of the festival. The film had a limited release in the United States and was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and won two: Best Original Screenplay for Michael Arndt and Best Supporting Actor for Alan Arkin. It also won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Feature and received numerous other accolades.

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BOOK TWO: American Pastoral by Philip Roth is a novel published in 1997 focusing on Seymour “The Swede” Levov, a successful Jewish American businessman and former high school star athlete from Newark, New Jersey. Levov’s happy and conventional upper-middle-class life is ruined by the domestic social and political turmoil of the 1960s during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, which in the novel is described as a manifestation of the “indigenous American berserk.” It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 and was included in Time‘s “All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels.” In 2006, Roth’s book was one of the runners-up in the “What is the Greatest Work of American Fiction in the Last 25 Years?” contest held by the New York Times Book Review.