Outreach
Santa Fe Community Seminar Series - Fall 2009
Community Seminars are special opportunities for community members to read and discuss seminal works in the same unique manner as our students. Seminars are discussion-based and small in size in order to ensure spirited dialogue. There are topics to pique every interest, and for many participants the discussion-based learning model is an entirely new experience.
The Community Seminar Series will be offered as four- to six-week seminars meeting one day a week. Weekend seminars meet Friday evening, Saturday afternoon, and Sunday afternoon, and will be accompanied by light refreshments.
Please call 505-984-6099 to register for any of the seminars. Teachers with proof of employment can enroll in a Community Seminar at a 50-percent discount. Community Seminars are free to 11th and 12th grade high school students (limited spaces available).
Faulkner’s South: Go Down Moses
Date: Tuesdays, September 15 – October 20 (six weeks)
Time: 4:00 – 6:00 p.m.
Tutor: Jessica Jerome
We will read Faulkner’s Go Down Moses, a series of seven interrelated stories set in Faulkner’s mythic southern country – Yoknapatawpha. The stories are told from a variety of perspectives – African American and white, and through generations. As they navigate the complex realities of life in the early 20th century south, we learn more about the nature of man himself.
Recommended Edition: Vintage International
First Assignment: “Was” from Go Down Moses
Cost: $180
Doris Lessing: The Golden Notebook
Date: Wednesdays, September 23 – October 28 (six weeks)
Time: 6 – 8 p.m.
Tutor: Emily Rena-Dozier
Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing's novel The Golden Notebook has been hailed as a classic text of feminist literature. The novel grapples with questions of women's identity as connected to or disconnected from sex, marriage, work, and children. However, it also asks profound questions about some of the twentieth century's most influential ideological structures: capitalism, communism, colonialism, and psychoanalysis. The Golden Notebook is a structurally innovative, politically complex, and profoundly moving meditation on the apparent fragility and ultimate resilience of the thinking self in modern society.
Required Edition: Harper Perennial (ISBN 13: 978-0060931407)
First Assignment: Free Women 1 (pp. 1-242)
Cost: $180
Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own
Weekend Seminar: September 25 – 27
Time: Friday, 6 – 8 p.m., Saturday and Sunday, 1 – 3 p.m.
Tutor: Keri Ames
“The book has somehow to be adapted to the body…” insists Virginia Woolf as she tackles her topic of women and fiction with great narrative cunning and glee, incorporating a trinity of Marys (by the last names of Beton, Seton, and Carmichael) to serve as her narrators in an essay that itself defies categorization into any simple genre. In so doing, she provokes us to question the interaction between genre and gender. For Woolf finally claims, “…it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.” Woolf’s writing gives birth to the possibility of a genius beyond gender while compelling us to consider why, whether we are male or female, we all need rooms of our own and what impact Woolf's narrative strategy has on us.
Recommended Edition: Harvest Books, 2005 (ISBN-10: 0156030411)
First Assignment: Chapters 1 -- 2
Cost: $180 (including refreshments)
The Rise and Fall of Kings: Shakespeare’s Richard II & Henry IV, Part One
Date: Tuesdays, September 29 – November 3 (six weeks)
Time: 5 – 7 p.m.
Tutor: Lawrence Nee
Please join us for this seminar in which we will read two of Shakespeare’s most famous and moving plays: Richard II & Henry IV, Part One. Constituting the first half of Shakespeare’s second tetralogy, these two masterpieces detail the tragic fall of Richard, the struggles of his successor Henry, and the education and rise of the would-be king Hal. While tracing the volatile events of this critical historical period, these plays also grapple with perennial problems. Through both the elevated poetry of Richard and the bawdy antics of Falstaff, perhaps Shakespeare’s most memorable character, these plays pose for our considerations questions about the relationship of the divine to the human, the role of the imagination in human life, and the nature of justice. While considering these and other questions, we will also have the pleasure of discussing two of the most beautiful texts ever written in English.
Recommended Edition: Any unabridged edition
First Assignment: Shakespeare’s Richard II, Act I
Cost: $180
Rumi: Poetry
Weekend Seminar: October 2 – 4
Time: Friday, 6 - 8 p.m., Saturday and Sunday, 1- 3 p.m.
Tutor: Michael Wolfe
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”—as well as 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.
Recommended Edition: Packet of readings TBD
First Assignment: TBD
Cost: $180 (including refreshments)
Nietzsche: Will to Power
Date: Saturdays, October 10 – November 14 (six weeks)
Time: 1 – 3 p.m.
Tutor: David Carl
These selections from Nietzsche’s notebooks, compiled between 1883 and 1888, present us with the widest range of Nietzsche’s thought in any single volume of his work. Encompassing his writings on nihilism, religion, morality, politics, nationalism, art, science, philosophy, and the general formation of axiological studies, this work also provides an overview of Nietzsche’s theories of the Dionysian, the Eternal Return, and the Will to Power. Never published as an organized book during his lifetime, these collected notes nevertheless accurately represent the sweeping range and fragmentary nature of Nietzsche’s anti-systematic thinking and radical approach to philosophy.
Recommended Edition: Nietzsche, The Will to Power, edited by Walter Kaufmann (Vintage Press, ISBN 0-394-70437-1)
First Assignment: “Critique of Religion,” pp. 85-146
Cost: $180
Virginia Woolf: Orlando
Date: Wednesdays, October 21 – November 11 (four weeks)
Time: 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.
Tutor: Keri Ames
Woolf's novel begins, "He--for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it--was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters." Our narrator's first claim is that there could be no doubt of Orlando's sex, and yet, that is exactly what there turns out to be! Before the novel is done, three hundred years will have passed, and Orlando will have become a modern woman. So, Woolf's novel provokes us to ask: is there ever no doubt about sex? Or sexuality? How do disguise and violence prevent us from knowing Woolf's characters and maybe even from knowing ourselves? We will explore how Woolf's narration compels us to explore the connections between sex, sexuality, identity, and cultural context, seeking to understand exactly what about identity transcends the 'fashion of the time."
Recommended Edition: Harvest Books, 2006 (ISBN-10: 0156031515)
First Assignment: Chapters 1 – 2
Cost: $180
Three Early Plays of Samuel Beckett: “Waiting for Godot,” “Endgame,” and “Krapp’s Last Tape”
Weekend Seminar: November 20 – 22
Time: Friday, 5 – 7 p.m., Saturday and Sunday, 1 – 3 p.m.
Tutor: David Carl
The work of Samuel Beckett (stories, novels, and plays) has given us a starker, more disturbing, and more radical vision of the modern world than that of any other 20th century writer. Simultaneously formally innovative and thematically unprecedented, Beckett has created an array of characters (clowns and recluses, misfits and misanthropes) that has uniquely decimated the classical distinction between tragedy and comedy. The darker the world-view Beckett shares with his audience, the funnier his black vision becomes. The question of whether there is any hope of redemption either for or from these frustrated characters and their equally frustrating situations is one that has confounded readers and audiences of Beckett’s work since the first performances of Godot in Paris in 1953 (in French) and London in 1955 (in English). Endgame was first performed in 1957 and Krapp’s Last Tape in 1958.
Recommended Edition: Paperback Grove Editions of each of these three plays.
First Assignment: Waiting for Godot
Cost: $180 (including refreshments)