Cornerstone’s ‘Reading Allowed’ explores life through spoken literature
Chris Yeomans, the Justin S. Morrill Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, reads aloud to students from Alice McDermott’s “Charming Billy” as part of the Cornerstone “Reading Allowed” program. (Purdue University photo/Sharel Welch)
INDIANAPOLIS — More than 70 Purdue students and faculty sat in stillness in the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library listening to a selection from Alice McDermott’s “Charming Billy,” read by Chris Yeomans, the Justin S. Morrill Dean of the College of Liberal Arts.
The October event was part of “Reading Allowed,” a monthly Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts program featuring College of Liberal Arts faculty reading aloud to students from selected texts.
“Charming Billy,” winner of the 1998 National Book Award for fiction, begins with the funeral of the titular character, Billy Lynch, attended by family and friends. The novel delves into their relationships in a complex weave of love, faith and lies born of good intentions.
“One of the things I love so much about it is the quiet way it works on you,” Yeomans said. He appreciated the novel’s flashbacks, which allow the characters to reveal their secrets in an order that changes the reader’s interpretation of them. McDermott’s structure “opens that space between the events that are being narrated in the book and their significance and meaning,” he said. “You see the characters grappling with it and trying to tell different stories about it. You’re invited to do the same and then think about your own life in that way.”
Yeomans spoke about storytelling as an ancient human practice, one with added cues for the listeners.
“It’s easy for words to sort of flatten out, and it can be hard to appreciate the language,” Yeomans said. “It has a rhythm to it; there are dynamics — some of it is soft and loud, and some of it is fast and slow, and that could be connected to the meaning of what’s going on.”
Lexi Guin, a freshman studying mechanical engineering in Indianapolis, said she enjoyed the reading.
“Literature can have some really good insights that I think more people need to hear,” she said.
For Yeomans, that shared experience is at the heart of “Reading Allowed” and the broader mission of the liberal arts.
“Language lives in us, and we live through it. It carries the concepts by means of which we make meaning out of our lives,” Yeomans said. “It is easy to forget that when you’re just reading but easy to remember when you see an actor speak lines on a stage or hear someone read aloud. One of the best things the liberal arts can do is to call us back to this lived and social experience of language.”
Students may find out about upcoming “Reading Allowed” sessions through the Purdue University Events Calendar.
About Purdue University
Purdue University is a research institution ranked among the top 10 public universities in the United States. More than 111,000 students study at Purdue across multiple campuses, including more than 57,000 at our main campus locations in West Lafayette and Indianapolis. As a land-grant university committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue’s main campus has frozen tuition 14 years in a row, enabling more students than ever to graduate debt-free.
