Summer Classics 2011
Week I
July 11 - 15, 2011
- Lawrence Durrell | The Alexandria Quartet
- Joseph Conrad | The Secret Agent
- Flannery O’Connor | Wise Blood, “The Enduring Chill,” and “Parker’s Back”
- Sigmund Freud | Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
- Nathaniel Hawthorne on Science, Technology, and Progress
- Søren Kierkegaard | Fear and Trembling
Morning
Lawrence Durrell | The Alexandria Quartet - Full. Please call to be added to the wait list.
Eva Brann and Patricia Greer
The setting is magically real Alexandria, a city “of five races, five languages, a dozen creeds...but more than five sexes.” Wonderful and terrible things happen; all are woven into a “word-continuum” delineating a vivid crew who are, by turns, comic, tragic, bizarre, smooth, pathetic, poignant – and ingeniously bound up with each other.
Joseph Conrad | The Secret Agent
Michael Peters and Steven Isenberg
Terrorism, ideology, espionage and homeland security. Sound familiar? All these and domestic life as well are intertwined in Joseph Conrad’s tale set in 19th century London.
Flannery O’Connor | Wise Blood, “The Enduring Chill,” and “Parker’s Back” - Full. Please call to be added to the wait list.
Eric Salem and Cary Stickney
In her first novel, Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor joins the great comedic writers in the tradition of Dante and Chaucer. Like them, she takes Christianity seriously: it may be only a rumor that Euripides consulted with Socrates while writing his plays, but it is well-attested that O’Connor read a little Thomas Aquinas every night. Like them, too, she is deeply interested in the particulars of the world, the mysteries of individual choice and character that constitute the life of human beings, real and imagined. In Hazel Motes, the novel’s protagonist, she has imagined one of the fiercest characters, and in his side-kick Enoch Emery one of the funniest, among the ferocious and laughable ones who populate her fiction.
About the two stories, “The Enduring Chill” and “Parker’s Back,” it may be best to quote her own remarks in an essay called “Writing Short Stories”:
“In most good stories it is the character’s personality that creates the action of the story. [...] If you start with a real personality, a real character, then something is bound to happen; and you don’t have to know what before you begin. In fact it may be better if you don’t know what before you begin. You ought to be able to discover something from your stories. If you don’t, probably no one else will.”
These are very good stories and she surely discovered things as she wrote them. We, too, with any luck, can undoubtedly look forward to some discoveries as we read and discuss them.
Sigmund Freud | Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
Jan Arsenault and Linda Wiener
The Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis is the compilation of lectures that Sigmund Freud delivered at the University of Vienna in 1915–1916 and 1916–1917. His examination of the existence and influence of the unconscious in our lives is provocative and unsettling; his discovery of “talk therapy” is intriguing. Errors we make, dreams we dream, and symptoms we suffer all “have a sense” and a purpose. As analyst and patient sit together, one talks and the other listens. Through this practice the sense and purpose of the patient’s symptoms come to light. What is this particular kind of listening which adds meaning and depth to a life?
Afternoon
Nathaniel Hawthorne on Science, Technology, and Progress
Topi Heikkerö and Michael Wolfe
We will read six Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) short stories that touch upon the moral meaning of modern science. Many of Hawthorne’s best stories reflect on the role of modern science in human life. He was not primarily interested in the details of the discoveries or inventions, but focused on the will and desire inherent in modern science and technology. Dreams of immortality and enhanced powers are as old as humanity, but in scientif ic projects they find new concrete manifestations. While some have lamented the dry and mechanical features of modern science, Hawthorne perceived remnants of mythical thinking, dreams, and sorcery in the margins of the scientific mindset.
Søren Kierkegaard | Fear and Trembling
Keri Ames and David Starr
We will undertake a close reading of a book that truly lives up to its title. God’s command to Abraham in Genesis 22, “Take your son, the only one whom you love, and offer him as a burnt offering...,” incites a profound crisis regarding who this God is, what he wants, and what worshipping him comprises. Kierkegaard gives us a narrator, Johannes de Silentio, who comments on this crisis of Genesis 22. Why does Kierkegaard give us such a narrator instead of speaking in his own voice, and why does that narrator have silence in his name? Is there some way in which we must learn to listen to silence if we are to understand what happens to Abraham and Isaac on Mount Moriah? Our close reading will tackle the deep and urgent questions that make us tremble in fear.