Outreach: Santa Fe

Summer Classics 2008
Week III

July 20–25

Morning 10 am – noon

Afternoon 2 – 4 pm

Morning 10 am – noon

Shakespeare: Macbeth
 Judith Adam and Warren Winiarski

Shrouded in the mists of ancient Scotland, a world of Kings, warriors and witches, Shakespeare’s Macbeth unfolds a tragedy of political ambition taken to murdering extremes while still making claims on the reader’s sympathies. More than the perennial political story of a man who would be king and acts on his desire, the play travels through psychological depths, insanity, and supernatural realms before it reaches its bloody conclusion. It also depicts perhaps the most intimate and infamous of Shakespeare’s great couples.

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Tales from the Mahabharata
 Patricia Greer and Mark Singleton

The Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit epic, is the longest poem in the world. Along with the Bhagavadgita and events related to the central narrative, it contains dozens of myths and story-cycles. Over the week we will read five of the most intriguing tales from the first and third of the Mahabharata’s eighteen books — tales of romance, mystery and magical snakes, myths of the origins of everything, and deep reflections of humanity, divinity, and cosmos.

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Hope and Longing in the Modern World: Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle
 Travis Cook and Walter Sterling

We will read Solzhenitsyn’s great work The First Circle. In Dante’s Inferno, the first circle of Hell was reserved for the wisest pagan thinkers whom Dante could not bring himself to damn outright for their lack of faith. Solzhenitsyn sets his novel in a sharashka — that part of the Soviet labor camp system where scientists, mathematicians, and other prisoners still valuable to the regime were set to scientific research and technological development. Solzhenitsyn’s novel examines the most enduring human concerns as they arise in a society dominated by science and tyrannical politics.

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Afternoon 2 – 4 pm

Faulkner: Go Down, Moses
 Elizabeth Engel and Steve Van Luchene

These seven stories – which Faulkner is said to have claimed made up a novel – reflect upon and challenge one another, raising questions about race, inheritance, identity, guilt and redemption, beauty and truth.

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Marriage in Chaucer
 Phil LeCuyer and Laurence Nee

The subject of marriage acts as a unifying theme for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Four of his tales (The Wife of Bath’s Tale, Clerk’s Tale, Merchant’s Tale, and Franklin’s Tale) explicitly treat the subject, while a fifth (The Knight’s Tale) serves as a prologue and introduction to all of the tales and provocatively treats the subject as well. Through these lively tales, we will examine not only marriage, but also the character of human beings more generally.

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Conrad: Under Western Eyes
 Ken Davis and David Levine

Joseph Conrad, Author’s Note, Under Western Eyes, 1920: “The most terrifying reflection...is that all these people are not the product of the exceptional but of the general — of the normality of their place, and time, and race. The ferocity and imbecility of an autocratic rule rejecting all legality and, in fact, basing itself upon complete moral anarchism provokes the no less imbecile and atrocious answer of a purely Utopian revolutionism encompassing destruction by the first means to hand, in the strange conviction that a fundamental change of hearts must follow the downfall of any given human institutions. These people are unable to see that all they can effect is merely a change of names.”

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