Summer Classics 2010
Week II
July 18 - 23, 2010
- Robertson Davies | The Cornish Trilogy
- Flannery O’Connor | The Violent Bear it Away and selected short stories
- Carl Jung | Modern Man in Search of a Soul: An Introduction to the Thought of Carl Jung
- New Comedy
- Rumi | Poetry
- James Joyce | A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Robertson Davies |
The Cornish Trilogy
Eva Brann and Janet Dougherty
These three interconnected novels tell of kindly crooks, sensitive bankers, protective demons, kinky professors and wise gypsies. The main scene is a place called St. John’s College, also known as “Spook.” The chief issues are human deviltry, virtuous fraud, lawless decency, historical resurrection and always: what is art?
Flannery O’Connor |
The Violent Bear it Away and
Selected Short Stories
Eric Salem and Cary Stickney
Flannery O’Connor reminds the reader of the original ancient meaning of the monstrous: it is what demonstrates, what shows some truth. Her fiction is inhabited by monsters of faith and monsters of reason; to get the reader’s attention, one might suggest. She would probably have replied that it had more to do with portraying the actual inhabitants of the world. Extreme though they are, in O’Connor’s characters, as in Kafka’s or Beckett’s, we recognize ourselves.
The Violent Bear It Away refers to the verse from the Gospels according to which “The Kingdom of Heaven is taken by storm,” and seeks to bring us amidst laughter and horror to what redemption might look like in a particular life. The two short stories, “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” and “Revelation,” continue the exploration of O’Connor’s conviction that Aeschylus was right when he said in the Agamemnon: “Grace comes somehow violent...”
Carl Jung | Modern Man in
Search of a Soul:
An Introduction to the
Thought of Carl Jung
Greg Schneider and Ken Wolfe
Modern Man in Search of a Soul is a small volume of collected essays by Carl Jung. ] These essays provide a thoughtful and captivating introduction to his thoughts and theories on the collective unconscious, personality types, individuation, the practice of analytical psychology and the contrast between his work and Freud’s. We will explore these essays and the profound implications raised by them for anyone intrigued by the roles that psychology, medicine and religion play in modern life.
New Comedy
Jacques Duvoisin and Jay Smith
“New Comedy” seems at first blush to be a trivial literary genre. However, some critics suggest that it may be the source of all of our modern literary forms. But why did New Comedy prosper while the seemingly more substantial genres of Epic and Tragedy fade? What important message did it convey? To get a sense of the importance of New Comedy we will consider a few Roman examples of the form by Plautus and Terence, and then compare them to a couple of examples from Shakespeare.
Rumi | Poetry
Michael Wolfe and Alan Zeitlin
The 13th-century Persian poet Jalaluddin Rumi has enjoyed enormous popularity among American readers in the last few decades, giving rise to numerous English translations in various styles. In this seminar we will approach a selection of Rumi’s lyric poems from multiple angles: we will read each poem in multiple English formats—both literal translations and non-literal “versions”—and will listen to the poems recited in their original Persian. This multifaceted approach will deepen our understanding of the Persian poetic tradition as well as the Islamic mystical (Sufi) tradition to which Rumi belonged.
James Joyce | A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Keri Ames and Llyd Wells
Exactly what kind of a portrait does Joyce’s novel give us? Stephen Dedalus emerges as the exile who must leave home in order to “forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race.” How does the novel justify the urgency of the need for the artist to exile himself? We will examine in detail the methods of Joyce’s narration and try to understand who Stephen is and why he acts as he does.