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Delve Readers Seminars Online Fall 2020: Far From the Madding Crowd

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The older well-to-do gentleman farmer, the dashing cavalry officer, or the steadfast shepherd—whom will accidental tenant farmer Bathsheba Everdene choose? Far From the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy’s 1874 novel that first established his international reputation, asks and answers that question. But, because this is Thomas Hardy, the course of true love is fraught with perils, tragic accidents of fate, well-meaning rustics, and—sheep. This is one of the great 19th century love stories, written by a master novelist/poet whose lifelong literary celebration of his beloved Dorset countryside is nowhere better displayed than here. This four-week Delve will explore Hardy’s mastery of place, country customs, and a now-departed way of life that can only be found…Far From the Madding Crowd. For this Delve, the guide strongly recommends…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminars Online Fall 2020: Far From the Madding Crowd
$150

Delve Online Fall 2020: Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

What is the purpose of public life? Should we live as thinkers or doers? These are the questions that Hannah Arendt tackles in her 1958 work ​The Human Condition. Philosophers have long argued that the ideal state for the human condition is a life of contemplation and inward-focus. Arendt questions the value of the ​vita contemplativa​ and she proposes that a life of action, ​vita activa​, is central to the human condition. Hannah Arendt is one of the most influential thinkers and writers of the 20th century. She is typically associated with her work on totalitarianism and the philosophical roots of evil and judgment. ​The Human Condition​ offers a comprehensive view of what Arendt sees as the inherent value of living with others and collectively…

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$230

Delve Readers Seminars Online Fall 2020: The Essays of Michel de Montaigne

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

There are few things more pleasurable than conversing with the great master of the essay, Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592). Sarah Bakewill’s excellent How to Live: A life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer (2011) has inspired wide current interest in Montaigne as a writer whom readers uncannily feel they know—our contemporary. He lived in a deeply contested and divided society, to which his answer was to become the greatest reader of his age. His essays, among the best ever written, bring all of life into discussion: from birth to death, from his hometown to the New World being explored and exploited in his day, all the virtues and the vices, cannibals and cats, drunkenness, books he read, names, thumbs, coaches,…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminars Online Fall 2020: The Essays of Michel de Montaigne
$150

Delve Readers Seminars Online Fall 2020: Lost Children Archive

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

“We walked out onto Broadway, into the late morning, and the city was buzzing, the buildings high and solid, the sky pristine blue, the sun bright—as if nothing catastrophic were happening.” Valeria Luiselli’s newest novel ​Lost Children Archive ​contrasts a privileged existence in a time laden with myriad state-funded horrors. It begins with a woman in New York who records soundscapes for NYU, translating for a mother from Tlaxiaco whose two children are held in a Texas detention facility. As the unnamed narrator learns more about the hundreds of detention facilities imprisoning migrant youth, she is compelled to leave New York with her family to drive to Arizona. Her plan is to interview these detained children, uplift their stories, and provide a perspective on the…

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$150

Delve Readers Seminar: Nigerian Authors: Abi Dare and Akwake Emezi

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

This seminar focuses on two Nigerian authors who rely on the use of foreign languages in their work. In The Girl With the Louding Voice, Abi Dare’s pidgin (broken English) is used in the narrator’s voice throughout the story. Discussions will include topics around class, race and the roles of children as domestics in African culture. In The Death of Vivek Oji, by Akwake Emezi, we will explore the story about the freedom of expressing one’s sexuality as it pertains to Nigerian culture through their eyes. Texts The Girl With the Louding Voice by Abi Dare The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwake Emezi Delve Access Program We want Delve seminars to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar: Nigerian Authors: Abi Dare and Akwake Emezi
$240

Delve Readers Seminar: The “Middle space between languages”: Julia Alvarez and Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

This seminar will be an exploration of what Ingrid Rojas Contreras so accurately refers to as, “the middle space between languages,” in her essay, Translation as an Arithmetic of Loss. We will discuss the ways in which the characters in the two novels, Afterlife by Julia Alvarez and Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras, as well as the speakers in the additional poems, navigate the in-betweenness of being bilingual. Each text is a discovery of the ways in which people live both within and between two cultures, languages, and often, identities, and how this shapes their stories. We will also read the Rojas Contreras essay to question what is, both lost and gained, for the characters in the novels whose stories are…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar: The “Middle space between languages”: Julia Alvarez and Ingrid Rojas Contreras
$240

Delve Readers Seminar: Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

“The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren’t any other kind and yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was through the trees.” Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower   “You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.” Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed   When the unimaginable is occurring, how do we navigate the chaos? When violence is rampant and further disasters loom, where might we find guidance? Perhaps to books that have imagined the potential dystopias that we now seem to be approaching, books like The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin and Parable of…

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$240

Delve Readers Seminar: A Different Sort of Gilead: Marilynne Robinson

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Marilynne Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping, was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1982. In 2005, she was awarded the Pulitzer for her second novel, Gilead. In this seminar we will read both novels; a subsequent seminar will focus on Robinson’s third and fourth novels, which take up and expand upon the story told in Gilead. All novels are concerned with questions of family, home, memory, and the often fraught nature of human relationships. In Housekeeping, two sisters struggle towards maturity amidst tragic and complicated family circumstances. Set in a hauntingly atmospheric Idaho town, Robinson’s lyrical story blends the mundane and the mythical and confronts us with both the beauty and the difficulty of love. Gilead takes the form of journal entries, written by…

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$240

Delve Readers Seminar: Enrique Vila-Matas: On Writing

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

This Delve will focus on the work of perhaps one of the most celebrated contemporary Spanish authors, Enrique Vila-Matas (Barcelona, 1948) has been the recipient of numerous literary awards including the Premio Rómulo Gallegos, Prix Médicis and Premi Nacional de Cultura de la Generalitat. Widely translated and with a body of work that expands over 30 novels and several books of essays and short stories, Vila-Matas’ characters are writers who have stopped writing, who have fallen ill from reading too much literature or who muse in the folds and creases of their own theories about writing. To go mad from literature is intimately intertwined with the spirit of the Spanish novel, and so is the proliferation of quotes, the mysterious appearance of long lost manuscripts…

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$240

Delve Readers Seminar: Dystopias of Turkish Modernity: Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book and Bilge Karasu’s Night

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

This Delve seminar looks at two acclaimed authors of modern Turkish literature and their dystopian novels, The Black Book and Night. Dystopian narratives portray oppressive systems, and they display a deep suspicion of power structures and their alliance with scientific progress and technology. Published in 1985 in the aftermath of a brutal military coup in Turkey, Night depicts a violent secretive regime set out to murder its dissidents. Dystopian imagery of an unnamed city is permeated with dismembered bodies, silence, and angst. Reminiscent of Kafka’s works, Night raises the question of the relationship between power and justice. The multiple narrators of Night with their ever-shifting identities leave the reader with a profound sense of uncertainty. In a similar vein to Night, The Black Book (1990),…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar: Dystopias of Turkish Modernity: Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book and Bilge Karasu’s Night
$240
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