Classics Corner

Lecture

Classics Corner Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre

Tara Hayes, lecturer

In this lecture, Tara Hayes explores Charlotte Brontë’s decision to have Jane Eyre tell her own story directly to the reader and how Jane Eyre set a new standard for storytelling. Shared from a mature, emotionally and psychologically astute vantage, Jane’s journey from unwanted orphan girl to Mr. Rochester’s equal — some would say better — is not only a coming-of-age bildungsroman and proto-feminist novel but also a barrier-defying, class-shattering treatise on the power of one’s voice and the value of the individual.

This presentation is part of Tara Hayes' Classics Corner series. This year's season focuses on the journey. The quest. The odyssey. The path. Whether travel is undertaken individually or in a group, whether the obstacles to overcome are monsters of enormous size or personal fears and anxieties, whether or not the treasure or destination sought is actually found, all progress leads to the most significant of achievements: self-knowledge. The three foundational texts of the Western literary tradition with which Classics Corner returns in 2027 each take the reader on a particular journey and reveal that it is always the search itself that matters most.

Tara Hayes

Tara Hayes

Tara Hayes, Ph.D., has advanced degrees in English literature with additional focus on theory, science fiction and film. Known as “Dr. T” to her students while a professor at Wayne State and then Oakland University, Hayes is known beyond the academy as the Book & Film Club professor, facilitating groups both private and public engaged in elevating textual analysis and discussion.

A recipient of such distinctions as Trustee Scholar and Edward Wise Fellow, en route to her Ph.D., Hayes wrote her honor thesis on the transmutation of 19th-century American literary texts (The Scarlet Letter, The Last of the Mohicans, etc.) into 20th-century American films; completed a master’s degree in science fiction, feminist and psychoanalytic theory with an emphasis on dystopic texts — both novels and films — such as 1984, The Dispossessed, Blade Runner and The Matrix; and trained at Cornell’s School of Criticism and Theory.

Hayes also served domestically as a member of Teach for America and AmeriCorps, teaching high school in inner-city Houston, Los Angeles and the Mississippi Delta. In Detroit, she trained her African American literature and Shakespeare service-learning seminars to team with public and charter schools downtown and to mentor students and future teachers, modeled the integration of theory and practice and fostered opportunities for future teachers to help all students attain an excellent education.

In addition to her research, scholarship and teaching, Hayes worked at DreamWorks in the years of Steven Spielberg’s Amistad, The Lost World and Saving Private Ryan and curated his Shoah Foundation at USC, and she was part of the team that campaigned television pilot Dear Diary to an Oscar for Best Short Film.