Sweet Briar President Talks Trash with Friends

JENNIFER McMANAMAY
College relations staff writer

The Sweet Briar College Friends of Library and Friends of Art have invited SBC President Elisabeth Muhlenfeld to deliver the 2008 Gerhard Masur Memorial Lecture at 8 p.m. Friday, April 11. Her talk, “Analyzing Becky Sharp’s Trash,” will be held at the Florence Elson Inn & Conference Center.

The title is a reference to the main character in the 19th-century novel “Vanity Fair” by William Makepeace Thackeray. Upon being presented a copy of Samuel Johnson’s “Dictionary,” Becky Sharp chucks it out the window of the coach she is riding in with a dismissive utterance.

“Thus does Thackeray, who takes aim in this novel at all of society’s most revered institutions, set out Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary as the symbol of literary and lexicographical authority in the England of the early 19th century,” says Muhlenfeld.

And so, too, does Muhlenfeld introduce her topic, which is no less than the “history of English dictionaries — from the very first to the Oxford English Dictionary to contemporary dictionaries.”

The lecture is free and the public is welcome. For more information, please contact Joe Malloy at jlmalloy@sbc.edu or Ext. 6307.