Sign Up: Sound and the Fury starts this week; To the Lighthouse, Poetry & Magic Mountain

making choicesTime to Choose!!!

The Salons are starting this week; have you registered? The Salons thrive with your recommendation–please pass on the Salon news to those interested in the world of words and ideas…

starting Tuesday Sept. 24th 8-10 PM room for 3 more participants…

“They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.”  ― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

October 2nd & 9th; 12-1:30 

1st Session: Wislawa Szymborska: “The Acrobat”, “Nothing Ever Happens Twice” and “Commemoration”

2nd Session: Robert Frost: “Birches” –for details, see the ‘Event’ page

Alone. Or even less than alone,
less, because defective, for he lacks
lacks wings, lacks them very much,
a lack which forces him
to bashful soarings on unfeathered
by now just bare attention….

from The Acrobat by Wislawa Szymborska

Friday October 11th; room for 3 more participants….

In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys confronts the possibility of another side to Jane Eyre. The story of Bertha, the first Mrs Rochester,  the madwoman in the attic, is the subject of Rhys’ sensual writing. Wide Sargasso Sea is not only a brilliant deconstruction of Brontë’s legacy, but is also a damning history of colonialism in the Caribbean.

Starts Wednesday, October 16th meeting from 8-10 PM (please email me if you are interested in an afternoon TTL Salon)

“What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”  from To the Lighthouse 

  • Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (15 weeks, afternoon & evening Salons)

Starting end of October; evening studies on Wednesdays, afternoons Tuesdays 12:30-2:30; registration page to be posted this week…

Wide Sargasso Sea & Jane Eyre

Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre has always held readers’ imagination as Bronte presents her heroine as fiercely independent in a world where there is no place for a free-thinking female. Jane Eyre, the plain, orphaned child becomes sharpened through her struggles in the hands of tyrannical mother-substitutes, malignant boarding schools, demeaning poverty and an egotistical, impenetrable employer. But what continues to intrigue readers and audiences, as the multiple film version attest to, is not just Jane’s indomitable spirit but the other strange scenes and lives crammed into this 19th century novel of social criticism and Byronic heroes.

The hidden, voiceless character of Mr. Rochester’s first wife, who even in her silence greatly impacts Jane’s story, has caught the attention of critics and other writers. Jean Rhys, an early Modernist writer, chose to explore Bertha Rochester’s history in her brief but crystalline work, Wide Sargasso Sea. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys confronts the possibility of another side to Jane Eyre. The story of Bertha, the first Mrs Rochester, Wide Sargasso Sea is not only a brilliant deconstruction of Brontë’s legacy, but is also a damning history of colonialism in the Caribbean. One of our Paris Salon participants says this about Rhys: “I think these words from a Guardian critic sum her up pretty well: ‘She is loved not just for a talent that seems as spontaneous and individual in its personality as physical beauty, but for a special kind of courage.’ I would also add honesty, which brings Nualo O’Faolain to mind.”

These two works, taken together in this Salon intensive, will offer interesting commentaries on the positioning of the female as a space for madness and rebellion.

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