Summer Classics 2010

Week I
July 12 - 16, 2010

 

Daniel Defoe | Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe
 Eva Brann and Patricia Greer

This pair is diametrically opposed in mood. The first is hilariously lusty. Moll was born in prison, lived as a whore, was a multiple wife, thief and ends up rich and honest in America. The second is dark and introspective. Robinson spends the middle of his life all alone as a castaway, developing wonderful ingenuity but also dark depression, until rescued from solitude and his island.` The seventeenth century prose in either book is simply delectable.

 

William Faulkner | A Fable
 James Carey and Frank Pagano

Western civilization began its spectacular decline with the European civil war known as World War I. In A Fable, William Faulkner leaves his beloved American South and surveys the beginning of the ruin of the West on the French battlefront. He describes a fabulous account of what caused World War I to end: the regular soldiers merely refused to fight. What does Faulkner’s novel imply: has the West declined because World War I did not end in the manner described in A Fable, or because it did end in this fabulous way in truth?

 

Plato | The Republic
 Peter Pesic and Michael Peters

Arguably his most important work, Plato’s Republic remains hugely controversial even after two and half thousand years. In an extended dramatic dialogue, Socrates and his companions begin with the question of why we should choose to be just, even if we could do whatever we wanted without fearing the consequences. Their conversation considers the ideal soul and city through vibrant images and provocative assertions, inviting us to consider the creation of philosophy as a daring new human endeavor, comprising a journey from the dark cave of human opinions into the light of full reality, and leading to the immortality this great work celebrates and evokes.

 

Dogen | Shobogenzo
John Cornell and Mark Singleton

Shobogenzo—the Treasury of the Eye of Fundamental Teaching—represents one of the highest accomplishments in world religious literature. Composed in the 13th c. by Dogen, the founder of the Soto school of Zen in Japan, the collection of essays was secretly preserved for centuries as gathering the profoundest teachings of any Buddhist sage. Thanks to translations perfected over the last century, Shobogenzo has won recognition today for its literary art and didactic ingenuity as well as its philosophical subtlety. Given the difficulty of Dogen’s texts—the fact that they demand from readers the utmost in attentiveness and flexibility of mind with the purpose of awakening the Zen experience—this seminar will focus on close examination and interpretation of five essays from the “The Heart of Dogen’s Shobogenzo.”

 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart | The Magic Flute
 Ken Davis and Michael Golluber

Mozart’s famous opera is perhaps most famous for being open to so many different interpretations. The music is stunning, but what does it all mean? Is it a mere fairy tale, or an allegory about the nature of human beings? Is it pure entertainment, or political commentary? What does it have to teach us about love, death, reason, passion, mothers, fathers, daughters and sons? Is it a statement about the power of music itself?

 

Fyodor Dostoevsky | The Adolescent
Richard McCombs and David Starr

The Adolescent is Dostoevsky’s next tos last great novel and possibly his funniest. Written as the autobiographical memoir of an intelligent, selfconscious young man named Arkady Dolgoruky, it presents the thoughts and experience of the unacknowledged but well-educated son of an unmarried Russian aristocrat and a servant woman. His situation is ideal for observing and exposing the hypocrisies and injustices of 19th century Russian life, and he does so with acerbic wit, good will, high aspiration and adolescent insecurity. Arkady strikes many as an older and more sharply-drawn prototype of Salinger’s Holden Caulfield.

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