Outreach: Santa Fe

Summer Classics 2008
Week II

July 13–18

Morning 10 am – noon

Afternoon 2 – 4 pm

Morning 10 am – noon

Homer: Iliad
 Richard McCombs and Walter Sterling

Homer’s Iliad can stake a claim to be the foundational work of western literature. The poem offers us a great epic of the Trojan War. Its ambition and scope are greater still: a comprehensive reflection on love, friendship, the status of justice in the world, the limits of the value of glory, the tension between the domestic and the political, and the relation between the human and the divine. Over-arching all of this is the problem of mortality, the knowledge of our impending death, and the gravity this gives to human life and action.

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Plutarch: Lives
 David Carl and Lise van Boxel

We will read Plutarch’s accounts of the lives of famous human beings who were influential in the founding, development and fall of ancient Athens. The era in which these men lived is arguably one of, if not the, most brilliant moments in the history of the western world, and Athens was the diamond of this era. What qualities made these men of Athens great? What character traits did they have that might have contributed to the death of their amazing city-state? What might we learn from Plutarch about how we should live our own lives?

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Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro)
 William Fulton and Andy Kingston

The Marriage of Figaro, the most frequently produced Mozart opera in North America, is more than just a comic blockbuster. In this great opera buffa, Mozart and Da Ponte weave together the drama and the music into what Da Ponte called a “new kind of spectacle.” By listening to and reading the opera, we will try to understand this new dramatic power made possible by the interplay of Da Ponte’s libretto with Mozart’s musical forms. Participants are encouraged to attend the performance of The Marriage of Figaro by the Santa Fe Opera on Friday, July 18.

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Zohar: The Book of Enlightenment
 Ken Wolfe and Alan Zeitlin

The Zohar is the fundamental work of the Jewish mystical tradition, the Kabbalah. Taking the form of a commentary on Torah, it weaves together powerful symbolism, philosophy, and fiction.

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Afternoon 2 – 4 pm

Plato: Symposium and Phaedrus
 Eva Brann and Janet Dougherty

The Symposium and the Phaedrus are Plato’s most imaginatively philosophical works. Both dialogues are on love, both go from erotic passion to larger contexts, to education, rhetoric, politics, and philosophy. You have to have a heart of stone and a head of wood not to find these dialogues exciting.

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Ellison: Invisible Man
 Andy Kingston and Greg Schneider

In the decades since its publication, Invisible Man has become one of a handful of American works considered of the “first order” worldwide. Louis Armstrong and the blues frame this tale of an African- American man in twentieth-century America who embarks upon a lifelong journey for self-understanding. Like the music that permeates the novel, the invisible man is born in the rural south and ultimately finds his voice in the urban north. We will explore this rhythmic, inventive novel as a window into the American character, confronting the fundamental question posed by the invisible man: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”

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Dostoyevsky: The Idiot
 Keri Ames and David Starr

Can one imagine a genuinely innocent human adult? Would he have to be an idiot? Or might he be an intelligent, even educated, man with an unusual history? Even then he might appear to lack some essential element of human nature. How could he exist? Could he survive in “normal” society? Dostoyevsky imagines a remarkable tragic scenario, if “tragic” is the right word for a text that challenges normal literary genres. We shall read and discuss this experimental novel, the story it tells, and the ideas it explores.

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Virgil: Aeneid
 Eric Salem and Cary Stickney

The Aeneid is a poem about the founding of a great city and great empire, Rome. In the first half we see Aeneas and his people make their way from Troy across the Mediterranean; in the second we see them establish a successful foothold in Italy. But the Aeneid is also a poem about loss: in it we see Aeneas lose his home, his wife, his father, his one chance at true love, many of the men he cares about, and perhaps something of himself. What connects these two themes? Does Virgil see something peculiarly Roman about their intertwining? Or is political greatness bound up necessarily with great suffering?

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