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Delve Readers Seminars Online: Best Friends Forever: Female Friendship in Literature

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

“It would be ten years before they saw each other again, and their meeting would be thick with birds.” This Delve will explore female friendship, as written by women writers, through both a fiction and nonfiction lens. These friendships are complex and nuanced, sometimes ugly, sometimes enduring, and sometimes one of the most significant relationships of a lifetime. Through Toni Morrison’s beautiful and stirring Sula and Nel, Hungarian writer Szabo’s unlikely relationship between a woman and her housekeeper in The Door, and Ann Patchett’s exploration of her 20-year long friendship with writer Lucy Grealy, we will explore different paradigms of these relationships across time and culture. Texts: Truth and Beauty, Ann Patchett Sula, Toni Morrison The Door, Magda Szabo First assignment: Participants should read Truth…

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$150

Summer 2020 Delve Readers Seminar Online: Nigerian Voices: Chinua Achebe and Helon Habila

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

From the precolonial period to modern times, these two authors show the complexity of Nigerian history: the original tribal forms of organizing the society, where the strong man rules for good and for bad; the colonial era where those tribal communities transform in order to negotiate with the colonizers; and the postcolonial period that shows how the thirst for oil from the western powers also generates conflicts between the native peoples and a level of corruption that pervade every aspect of their lives. The transformations narrated in these two books are journeys of no return, with echoes from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Texts: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe Oil on Water by Helon Habila Participants are responsible for purchasing texts. First assignment: For the…

Continue readingSummer 2020 Delve Readers Seminar Online: Nigerian Voices: Chinua Achebe and Helon Habila
$150

Delve Readers Seminar Online: Milan Kundera

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Explore Czech writer Kundera alongside some of his inspirations. We will begin with his most famous work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, reading both the original text and exploring major influences on this work, through excerpts from Kafka and Nietzsche. We will also read his novel Immortality and short story collection Laughable Loves. We will discuss what is distinctive about Kundera’s style, such as his lyrical writing and preoccupation with philosophical themes. Of course, no discussion on Kundera would be complete without a discussion surrounding the thematic elements of totalitarianism and revolution. Reading List: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Immortality Laughable Loves Excerpts from Nietzsche and Kafka (guide will provide PDFs to…

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$230

Delve Readers Seminar Online: The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Metamorphosis

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In her book The Ethics of Ambiguity, the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir asks us to consider what it means to exercise individual freedom and to live in community with others. Where does our individual freedom begin and end? Simone de Beauvoir claims that our personal freedom can be manifest only when we “will others free.” How do we create a life where we protect our individual freedom and work toward the freedom of our neighbor? Can both forms of freedom truly exist? de Beauvoir wrote The Ethics of Ambiguity in 1947, and she questions and seeks to define personal ethics and freedom in the wake of Nazi atrocities and totalitarianism. We will read The Ethics of Ambiguity in its entirety. At first glance, Franz Kafka…

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$150

Delve Readers Seminar Online: Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller and Death in the Andes

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

“Opam-pogyakyena shinoshinonkarintsi. Me está mirando la tristeza.” Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa is known for his prolific oeuvre, particularly his long historical novels that portray different aspects and eras of Peru and other parts of Latin America; and yet, his less-known shorter works are narrative gems that show the complexities of the human condition, with characters that cross both geographic and fundamental inner boundaries. We will discuss Death in the Andes and The Storyteller, two books whose protagonists step outside of the predictability of their comfort zones and place themselves in remote communities, where they will assume a radical life transformation. Graphic designer, writer, translator, and photographer, Ivonne Saed has extensively explored the crossroads between the visual and the textual, both in her creative…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar Online: Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller and Death in the Andes
$150

Delve Readers Seminar Online: Ritual, Redemption, and Epiphany

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

This Delve will take place online via Zoom. Participants will receive information about how to connect with Zoom online. This Delve Seminar explores the common human experiences of redemption and epiphany and the role that ritual can play in ushering in such profound moments. Through our texts, we’ll examine how ritual can be used to protect societal structures as well as shift culture, how the tension between what has been and what might be leads to necessary conflict within the self, and how the power of acute experience ushers in clarity and the capacity for change. We will read two novellas, The Dead by James Joyce and Babette’s Feast by Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen), and a selection of short stories and poems by Alice Walker,…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar Online: Ritual, Redemption, and Epiphany
$150

Delve Summer 2020: The Case for Oregon Reparations

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

“The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of the most culturally-relevant examinations of America’s tradition of systematic economic exploitation, particularly of Blacks. Published in 2016, this Atlantic article, which veers into being a short book in length, looks at the foundational policies of the land: 400 years of slavery, decades of Jim Crow and separate but equal that have set the scene for the massive disparties found in the coutry today. The real human collateral of America’s plunder sets the scene for the question of Coates’ question: why hasn’t the country made a serious attempt into, at the very least, examining reparations. We will pair this reading with Portland State University professor Dr. Karen Gibson’s cutting delve into the effects of racist policies…

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$110

Delve Readers Seminar Online: Contemporary Korean Fiction

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

A look at 3 contemporary Korean writers. From a haunting meditation on grief to a powerful examination on capitalism, participants will discuss the themes that bind and distinguish these texts. Discussions will also focus on how translation affects our understanding of these novels as well as elements of Korean culture and current affairs that are uniquely reflected in these works. This seminar is offered exclusively for people of color Reading List: The White Book, Han Kang The Impossible Fairy, Han Yujoo Familiar Things, Hwang Sok-Yong Participants should read The Impossible Fairy before first class meeting. Hannah Kim is a writer, storyteller, and improv comedian. She is interested in radical intersectional feminism and how it relates to anti-capitalism and reclamation of the divine feminine. She is…

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$150

Delve Readers Seminar: J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Composed in the era of the Second World War, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings has become, through various incarnations, one of the best known stories in the world and also part of a larger system of myth and lore–thee so-called “Tolkien universe”–that also includes the Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and countless additional tales in prose and verse. The three volumes of The Lord of the Rings, however, are a distinct and remarkable literary accomplishment in their own right, the summoning up of an entire narrative world (with its own contexts, traditions, languages, civilizations, personae, and challenges), at once related to and distinct from the modern world of industry and war. Tolkien’s personal experience, his deep immersion in modern philology, his spiritual and historical affinities,…

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$220

Delve Readers Seminar Online Fall 2020: Fairytales Retold

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

When exactly is “once upon a time,” what does it mean to live “happily ever after,” and how do these tropes from childhood storybooks find their way into so much contemporary literature and film? These traditional frames for fairytales are just one of the aspects we’ll study in this Delve; we will examine other aspects of structure, characters, and motifs of folktales, both in collected oral tales and literary retellings of those same tales over time, into the current day. We will analyze these stories in various contexts to discover their shifting messages, paying close attention to how they have been used for enculturation, and how their historical values linger today. We will explore the roles of teller and audience, asking how societal norms are…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar Online Fall 2020: Fairytales Retold
$230
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