LitPDX seeks to amplify marginalized voices, and welcomes all, their ideas, their events, and their words.

For details regarding specific events please contact the organizers or venues. If you are an organizer or venue and would like to reach out to us please feel free to contact us or submit an event using our submission form. We’d love to hear from you!

delve readers seminar

  1. Events
  2. delve readers seminar

Events Search and Views Navigation

Event Views Navigation

Today

Delve Readers Seminar: History of the Peloponnesian War

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The Peloponnesian War is the Ancient Greek historian Thucydides’s account of the strife, conflict, civil war, and military and political catastrophe he witnessed and lived through as a citizen of Athens during and after the reign of the great Pericles in the 5th century BCE–the height of the classical period. A lifelong student of democracy, his meticulous and dramatic analysis of the decades-long strife between Athens and Sparta presents a complex and probing picture of politics, character, and what he calls stasis–protracted and irresolvable civil conflict. One of the masterpieces of world history, The Peloponnesian War has proven an enduring and strikingly relevant classic for modern thinkers, writers, and students of politics. In this six week seminar, we will read through and thoroughly discuss the…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar: History of the Peloponnesian War
$240

Delve Readers Seminar: Imagining the Future: Dystopic and Utopic Fiction

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Many of us have described the past year as “apocalyptic” or “dystopian.” We’ve been living through a global pandemic, a critical presidential election, ravaging wildfires, and a national reckoning with our country’s legacy of racism and police violence. Utopic and dystopic fiction can help us make sense of our experience and ask questions about our future. In this seminar we’ll read three works of utopic and dystopic fiction written by women authors. In our reading and discussion of each text, we will focus on a few core questions: Who are we, as a society? Who do we want to be? What gets in the way of becoming the society we dream of? What do fictional dystopias and utopias teach us about what we fear and…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar: Imagining the Future: Dystopic and Utopic Fiction
$240

Delve Readers Seminar: Søren Kierkegaard: What is Our Situation?

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In the six meetings of our Delve seminar we will read selections from books by Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), a philosopher of the highest importance and influence in general philosophy, moral philosophy, and religious thought. In Western philosophy, he stands with Plato and Nietzsche alone as a literary stylist of the greatest genius. The most familiar characterization of Kierkegaard is that he is the founder of existentialism. In this seminar we will try as best we can to look at him with fresh eyes. Most of us have never met a person like him. We’ve known lots of rebels, and lots of amazingly human and loving persons, lots of intense cranks and some brilliant conversationalists, and probably a few geniuses. But a person who combines all…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar: Søren Kierkegaard: What is Our Situation?
$240

Delve Readers Seminar: Joy Harjo: American Sunrise

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

…we still want justice. We are still America. We know the rumors of our demise. We spit them out. They die soon. -Joy Harjo,“American Sunrise” Our current poet laureate Joy Harjo describes her work as writing that both “tells the truth and creates the truth”, providing a “memory on which to build.” Harjo, a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, is the author of nine books of poetry, one memoir, several plays, children’s books, and most recently, the editor of the first historically comprehensive Native poetry anthology. She is also an accomplished saxophonist and vocalist who has released four albums of original music. In this seminar, we will read her latest poetry collection American Sunrise and her 2012 memoir Crazy Brave. Participants need not be…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar: Joy Harjo: American Sunrise
$240

Delve Readers Seminar: Five Contemporary Poets: Clifton, Harjo, Komunyaaka, and More

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

A Delve for BIPOC participants only A survey of five contemporary poets and their volumes of selected poems. We will focus on each poet’s body of work, starting with Lucille Clifton, then moving through the works of Joy Harjo, Yusef Komunyaaka, Arthur Sze, and Tracy K. Smith. By reading books that collect poems over decades, we will access each poet’s progressions in content, form, and style, as well as comprehensively approach the historical and cultural contexts reflected. Spending significant time with each poet will bring both breadth and depth to our discussions, and over the course of the seminar we will build a larger and more cohesive understanding of the work of poetry. Reading List: Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000, Lucille Clifton…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar: Five Contemporary Poets: Clifton, Harjo, Komunyaaka, and More
$240

Delve Readers Seminar: From Another Angle: Marilynne Robinson’s Home, Lila, and Jack

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In this seminar we will read Robinson’s third, fourth, and fifth novels, Home, Lila, and Jack. These novels complete the quartet that begins with Gilead. Home takes up the story of one of that novel’s characters, Jack Boughton. Nemesis of Gilead’s narrator John Ames and son of Ames’s best friend, Rev. Robert Boughton, Jack has returned to his childhood home unexpectedly after a twenty-year absence. Now he, his aging father, and his recently-divorced younger sister Glory must navigate a difficult and often painful reunion, haunted by the mistakes and misunderstandings of the past. Lila tells the story of John Ames’s late-life marriage from the perspective of his young wife, whose quiet gentleness reveals little of her wayward, often lonely history. Lila’s story, and her love…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar: From Another Angle: Marilynne Robinson’s Home, Lila, and Jack
$240

Delve Readers Seminar: New York City: Paul Auster and Jonathan Safran Foer

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Paul Auster and Jonathan Safran Foer are two contemporary authors who have explored New York City not only as a space where a person works, transits, and lives, but more as a symbolic space at a certain time that interacts with the fictional characters as if the city were also one of them—a living entity that actively affects the fates and actions of every person that inhabits it. Memory, chance, the double, and disobedience as a way to dig into the self are the literary elements that trigger the plots constructed by these two authors. In this Delve seminar we’ll discuss Auster’s Leviathan (1992), and Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). We will compare how each author recreates New York as a fictional place,…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar: New York City: Paul Auster and Jonathan Safran Foer
$240

Delve Readers Seminar: Moby-Dick

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

There are Great American Novels and then there is Moby-Dick, Herman Melville’s 1851 masterpiece. Have you read it years ago and forgotten it already? Have you thought you should read it? Should you read it right now? All signs point to “yes.” Melville is great, he is strange, he is important, and Moby-Dick stands atop the mainmast of American letters. It’s a novel, a poem, an opera, a play, the subject of countless New Yorker cartoons…and maybe it’s a story about a whale and a man, Captain Ahab, who has the most single-minded agenda of any fictional character ever. The novel is also great fun. Join Literary Arts Delve guide Christopher Lord aboard the Pequod for a six-week adventure that may stay with you for…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar: Moby-Dick
$240

Delve Readers Seminar: The Madwoman in the Attic and the Monstrous Feminine

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The “mad woman in the attic” is a common trope in gothic literature, but who is she? And how did she end up there? Integral to the gothic genre are stories of madness and haunting, which often serve as metaphors for social violence, race, gender and class warfare, and the abject. Stereotypically, the female protagonist in gothic literature plays the role of victim, but what about when she participates in her own monstrosity? In this seminar, we will explore some lesser known gothic novels with female protagonists who became “monstrous”, and explore the intersections between horror, mental illness, psychoanalysis, sexual repression, and gender identity in these female authored 20th century gothic works. Texts: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson Wide Sargasso…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar: The Madwoman in the Attic and the Monstrous Feminine
$240

Delve Readers Seminar: Love in the Time of Cholera

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

This iconic novel, that Thomas Pynchon called “shining and heartbreaking,” is absolutely what its name implies: A love story (or really many love stories) that occur during a cholera outbreak along the Carribean coast of Colombia. Following Fermina Daza, Dr. Juvenal Urbino, & Florentino Ariza, the book explores all the facets of love—from the innocent to the cruel, from the honest to the disgusting—all against a backdrop of death, showing us that even in the hardest conditions, we will fall in love. The narrative spans decades, & like the best of García Márquez’s work, it feels infinite: everything is presented in intoxicating detail. Delve Access Program We want Delve seminars to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar: Love in the Time of Cholera
$160
Click a category label below to view the calendar with only events in that specific category.