After experiencing with her students Tom Hooper’s 2012 Les Misérables film, she opened the conversation to the wider University community with Les Misérables: Inspirations for Today?, a Flash! Seminar on January 22, 2013, @ 5:00 p.m., with this description:
As Hugh Jackman toured the world promoting Les Misérables, he emailed me, “one question i am getting a lot is….does playing valjean change you…and the answer is yes!!!!!!! it makes you want to be a better man….every day.”
Has seeing the movie, watching the theater musical, or reading Victor Hugo’s novel changed you? Why or why not? We will particularly consider Hugo’s preface (below) and his story about what Jean Valjean and the bishop of Digne did after the bishop welcomed the ex-convict into his home (Part I, Book 2, Chapters 9-13).
Location:
Hotel D, East Range (just behind the Pavilion VI Garden)
Hugo’s Preface to Les Misérables:
As long as there exists, thanks to laws and customs, a social damnation which artificially creates hell at the heart of civilization and tangles destiny, which is divine, up with human fate; as long as the three problems of the century—man’s debasement through his proletarian situation, woman’s degeneration through hunger, the child’s atrophy through darkness—are not solved; as long as social asphyxiation is possible in certain places; in other words, and to take an even broader view, as long as ignorance and misery exist in this world, books like this one cannot be useless.