Outreach: Santa Fe

Summer Classics 2008
Week I

July 6–11

Morning 10 am – noon

Afternoon 2 – 4 pm

 

Morning 10 am – noon

Persian Poetry
 David Carl and Ken Wolfe

Am I a sinner or a saint,
Which one shall it be?
Hafiz holds the secret of his own mystery...

Love, wine, and God through the words of three Sufi masters – Omar Khayyam, Hafiz and Rumi.

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Verdi: Falstaff
 Christine Chen and William Fulton

This important and much-loved work, written when the composer was in his late 70s, is remarkable not only in its musical inventiveness and wealth of melody, but also for its wit and humanity. Verdi’s second comedy and final opera, it is a magnificent end to an extraordinary career.

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Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury
 Jim Carey and Frank Pagano

William Faulkner takes the title for this great novel from
Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “[Life] is a tale /Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing.” One of the four tellers of this tale about the American South is retarded, but is he the idiot of the tale? Or is his telling the most significant of the four versions of the tale we hear? There is hardly a book in American letters that considers the question of the significance of American life more deeply than does The Sound and the Fury.

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Short Works by Melville
 Travis Cook and Eric Poppele

But me they’ll lash in hammock, drop me deep. Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I’ll dream fast asleep. I feel it stealing now...

We will read four short works by Herman Melville: “Bartleby, the Scrivener;” Benito Cereno; The Encantadas; and Billy Budd.

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Afternoon 2 – 4 pm

Plato: Statesman
 Eric Salem and Cary Stickney

Plato’s Statesman is one of only three dialogues in which Socrates plays the more or less silent spectator. Here, on the eve of his trial and execution, he looks on while a mysterious stranger from Elea tracks down the statesman and his art. Animal husbandry and herd management, the rule of law and the types of regimes, philosophic inquiry, the art of measurement and the order of the cosmos — all fall within the scope of the stranger’s investigation. Does Socrates learn anything from this conversation? And what can we learn about politics, philosophy, and the order of things from this strange dialogue?

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Jane Austen: Persuasion and Charlotte Brontë: Villette
 Eva Brann and Emily Rena-Dozier

Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette are the most ardent books by these two disparate authors. Both novels break new ground, the former in its incipient romanticism and the latter in its daring use of in extremis situations.

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The Writings of Chuang Tzu
 William Kerr and Julie Reahard

“For all men strive to grasp what they do not know, while none strive to grasp what they already know; and all strive to discredit what they do not excel in, while none strive to discredit what they do excel in. That is why there is chaos.” We will work through the seven inner chapters and several important outer chapters of this classic text of Taoist thought.

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The Great War in Prose and Poetry
 Steven Isenberg and Michael Peters

Some of the most literate, thought-provoking, and descriptive work on soldiers in combat comes from World War I. We will explore the timeless themes that arose anew out of war in the trenches of France by reading and discussing All Quiet on the Western Front and a more recent novel, Regeneration, based in part on Siegfried Sassoon’s and Wilfred Owen’s time in a British military psychiatric hospital. As a complement to these books we will read and discuss some of the poetry of Owen, Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, and others.

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