Every year, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences leads the campus in reading one book and sharing our collective experience through discussions and events. This year, that book is all about love by bell hooks. Combining her own life experiences with decades of research, hooks synthesizes dozens of threads to propose an ethic of love that is sacred, redemptive, and uplifting while still being unflinchingly honest. We think we understand love, but hooks’s book asks us to reexamine learned assumptions and then reconnect with love as a verb, particularly as an act of mutual- and self-nurturing.
Dr. Linda Dove, Director of the Honors Program at Woodbury, titled one of next semester’s classes, Love (HONR 2708), and said the class will be “all about love – one of the most powerful forces in human life.” Across the semester’s activities, Professor Dove says guest faculty from a range of disciplines will discuss why love is “worth consideration…at this particular moment” and contemplate the many variations of love that pertain to their fields of study, some of which hooks gathers for exploration in her book. Students in all the 100-level INDS courses also read all about love this semester. They will process their thoughts about the book by writing critical essays, poetry, and nonfiction; some will create pieces of visual art.
The One Book One Campus events kicked off with Professor Mike Sonksen’s series of field trips to see artist Judith Baca’s Great Wall of Los Angeles, where participants considered connections between the mural’s messages and hooks’s book. The Great Wall is a 2,800-foot-long mural that delivers a 10,000-year people’s history of Los Angeles, spotlighting social and political struggles from the perspective of women and people of color.
Another event, “All About Banned Books!” was coordinated with the Library and the School of MCD. This event was a presentation of banned books, including bell hooks’s all about love and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.
Last Updated on October 23, 2023.