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Delve Readers Seminar: Vanity Fair

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

Vanity Fair (“A Novel without a Hero”), by William Makepeace Thackeray (1848), belongs on the same shelf with other towering novels of the Victorian age: Bleak House, Middlemarch, Jane Eyre, and The Way We Live Now. Its protagonist, Becky Sharp, is one of the most tantalizing, bewitching, infuriating, charming, scheming, and amoral characters in all of literature, and as we watch Becky negotiate poverty, war, marriage, and scandal, the reader constantly wonders: do I like her? Should I like her? Is she evil, or just practical? And what won’t she do to survive? In this five-week Delve, we will explore Thackeray’s brittle, cynical, and witty masterpiece of social manners, and see how the pressures of class, money, and Empire shape the lives of ordinary people…

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$210

Delve Readers Seminar: The Feminine Gothic: Victorian and American Horror

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

Novels of ghosts and haunted landscapes can open the door to discussions of sociology and repression, trauma, and the cathartic function of horror. In this seminar, we will examine themes of possession, repression, haunting, and the mad woman in the attic in four Victorian and American horror novels from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, and Laura van den Berg’s The Third Hotel. In-Person Seminar Note: This seminar meets in-person at Literary Arts, 925 SW Washington.Please see our complete Covid-19 policy here. Access Program We want our classes to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition structure can present obstacles for some people. Our Access…

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$245

Delve Readers Seminar: Plato On Love

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

The Symposium by Plato asks: what is love? It is the story of a banquet in classical Athens, attended by Socrates and his friends, at which each person tells a story about the origin of Love. These stories are full of deep psychological insight, powerful mythic imagination, and profound philosophical reflection that have made The Symposium one of the masterpieces of world literature and a crowning work of philosophy. Bawdy and sentimental, drunk and wise by turns, with a surprising turn of events near the end, each story illuminates a striking part of the human condition. The event is crowned by Socrates’ own story, telling us the origin of his gift and portraying the nature of the world in terms of Love. Throughout the night,…

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$245

Delve Readers Seminar: The Brothers Karamazov

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

The American novelist Walker Percy described The Brothers Karamazov as “maybe the greatest novel of all time . . . . almost prophesies and prefigures everything—all the bloody mess and the issues of the 20th century.” It’s fair to extend Percy’s observation to include the mess of the present century as well. The Brothers K is Dostoevsky’s masterpiece: a gripping tale of murder and family conflict that explores profound questions of faith, doubt, free will, morality, and the existence of God. The novel’s structure is equally complex, featuring multiple narrators and shifting points of view, and a wide cast of characters and voices. Dostoevsky considered the book a complete expression of his thinking about the human condition. This Delve will offer participants the opportunity to…

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$340

Delve Readers Seminar: “Real Women Have Bodies”: the grotesque in women writers’ short stories

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Genre-defying writers Carmen Maria Machado, Sayaka Murata and Bora Chung incorporate elements from fairy tales, horror and science fiction to give us lopsided but chillingly familiar scenes from our society. Whether in Machado’s rewriting of folklore in “The Husband Stitch”, Murata’s imaginings of a world where we eat dead people in “Life Ceremony”, or Chung’s nightmarish rendering of a body made of a woman’s excrement in “The Head”, these stories don’t shy away from body horror, rather choosing to dive right into the messy as well as the sometimes disgusting realities of being a human, and woman, in our world. Texts (selected stories) Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung Access Program We…

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$160

Delve Readers Seminar: Language as resistance, words as collage: Don Mee Choi and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Though published many decades apart, these two texts share similarities both in their subject matter and their experimental qualities. Just as Dictee cannot be merely labeled as a memoir and DMZ Colony cannot be labeled purely as a poetry collection, both texts expand our understanding of genre by weaving together prose, poetry and photographs. Moreover, they “hold history accountable” by integrating historical events into the deeply personal, ranging from Japanese colonization of Korea to the Korean War. In doing so, these Korean American writers give voice to feelings and understandings that have often been silenced. By looking at these two texts in tandem, we will examine their use of language to resist power and silencing as well as how their experimental methods seek to give…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar: Language as resistance, words as collage: Don Mee Choi and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
$160

Delve Readers Seminar: Little Things: A Study of Literary Compression

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

“It’s the little things that count”; “Good things come in small packages”; “Brevity is the soul of wit”; “The Devil’s in the details”… We’ll put these aphorisms to the test in this Delve Seminar exploring short poems, prose poetry, and short/micro fiction. These compressed forms aren’t lacking for content in their brevity, and we will explore ways of extracting their compressed contents like we would with zip files, expanding them like dry sponges in water, receiving the full communications of their code like expert cryptographers. We’ll also try writing a few small pieces of our own to learn through direct experience just what makes them tick. Authors we’ll read include Emily Dickinson, Russell Edson, Lucille Clifton, William Carlos Williams, Matsuo Bashō, and many more. Access…

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$240

Delve Readers Seminar: Haunted Chambers: Piranesi and The Little Stranger

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

Setting is an important aspect of every story, but sometimes it is so integral as to be almost a character in itself. Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi and Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger explore the unsettling power of place and its influence on the human mind. Piranesi lives in the House, a fantastical, dreamlike structure where ocean waves surge through infinite vestibules, clouds float and birds fly through halls decorated with statuary, and human remains lie secreted in niches. Alone except for occasional visits from a man he calls the Other, Piranesi records his daily routines and discoveries in his journal, muses on the Other’s quest for “a Great Secret and Knowledge,” and gradually unravels mysteries that threaten to upend his fragile contentment. In The Little Stranger,…

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$240

Delve Readers Seminar: Romeo and Juliet

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland is producing two Shakespeare plays this season, Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night—both perennial favorites. OSF tries to make these plays fresh for contemporary audiences with inventive or provocative interpretations. These seminars will help you think through how you might stage the dramas if you were the director. How do we take a written text and imagine it on stage? For live theater, directors must ensure that every line, every gesture, every costume, every set—in short, everything the audience will see and hear—conforms to a consistent interpretation of the play. These seminars are great preparation for your trip to Ashland, and will help you get much more out of the performances. If you read Romeo and Juliet in high…

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$125
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