Spirited Response to The Call of the Wild

The Big Read starts strong at Fredonia’s Reed Library with an active audience and an insightful discussion around Jack London’s The Call of the Wild.

After a quick introduction to Jack London and a recap of his book the presentation moved into an open forum for discussion. Audience members responded positively to our variety of questions. From the novel itself to broader implications surrounding the humanities at large we asked audience members to think about The Call of the Wild both historically and from contemporary perspectives.

Accessible and Engaging. Our crowd had varying amounts of previous experience with Jack London and his works. Even so, the folks who hadn’t read the book could jump in on discussion about the ideas London had formed his novel around.  The conceptual content of the work is reasonably universal so gearing our questions towards the content in turn made our discussion reasonably universal. The hard context of The Call of the Wild was touched on, but served as a jumping off point more than anything else.

By focusing on philosophical content we were able to draw attention to the cultural application of literature.  The audience engaged with our questions and through our questions grew closer to the text. Our forum was a living model of active reading, exactly the experience the Big Read is after.

The topics we covered and effects they produced. Our talk started with the virtues of literacy. We talked about fiction and the power it has to inform while entertaining. We talked about contemporary applications of London’s philosophy and were pleasantly surprised with the audience engagement. In time we returned to London and the cultural climate that might have produced The Call of the Wild. Discussion was spirited and well paced. The talk easily filled an hour of time and audience members approached us after the presentation for further discussion.

Our presentation incorporated, not only on the book itself, but the tenets of the Big Read. We were lucky to have such strong audience engagement and we were pleased to have had this opportunity to launch the 2013 Big Read at Fredonia.