New York Public Library Colloquium on Candide

The New York Public Library hosts regular live events (details here), and one of these was held in April 2010 to celebrate Candide’s 250th Anniversary. Read about it, watch/listen to it, and get the transcript here. Here’s the video (95 min):

You can also download just the audio from iTunes U.

Though some parts of this are simply librarians getting much too excited about the capabilities of the Internet, there are also attempts to connect the book to the present day, a bit of dramatic reenactment, some illustrations, and best of all, a long stretch of PEL-like exchanges about the themes, and even a bit of the philosophical content, of the book. It gets into areas like feminism, anti-semitism, and meliorism, which we didn’t get into on our episode. I referred to it explicitly with regard to the discussion of the sequels to Candide not written by Voltaire.

Here’s a brief, related video version of a lecture by Paul LeClerc about how Candide was even pretty recently on the Vatican’s list of forbidden books:

Watch on YouTube. Download from iTunes U.

Here’s a 2-minute trailer sort of thing giving the plot of Candide, featuring a number of illustrations that were on display at the NYPL for the event:

Watch on YouTube.