Literature Studies

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”

Toni Morrison, writer, professor and essayist on issues including race, gender and forces of life, won the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Beloved is regarded by many as Morrison’s best work, and once you have spent some time in the text, it is easy to understand why. Morrison works to help the reader grasp the psychological devastation wreaked by the institution of slavery by close observation of a community of ex-slaves creating lives in Ohio in the second half of the 19th century.

This text is meaty and evocative, and also quite difficult to read alone. The work also offers endless possibilities in terms of discussion of the formation of self, claiming of self, mother/child relationships, the fury of love, the permeable boundaries between the living and the not living, as well as the more predictable (but no less provocative) issues of race, gender and role of history.

But what you need to know– along with the history and context which will be provided as part of the Salon–is that the writing is so gorgeous. Morrison tackles the most painful aspects of human experience with an honesty and lyricism that will leave you breathless. If this is your first reading of the book, try not to read around too much: many reviews and commentary give away the central traumatic event that Morrison reveals carefully and purposefully in her own time. I think Morrison is very purposeful in the way she tells this story—we will discuss the framing and the narrative progression and her purpose there.

 

SALON DETAILS 

• FAIRFAX: One- Meeting Salon Intensive  Sunday August 18th 2:30-7:30 PM  We will have an optional pot-luck meal to finish the study.
• Meeting in Fairfax VA (address supplied upon registration)
• Facilitated by Salon Director Toby Brothers
• Cost $40.00 includes notes and critical resources *reduced cost for first-time participants*
• RECOMMENDED EDITION: VINTAGE New ed.  ISBN-10: 0099760118

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TO REGISTER, please use the Paypal button below to pay $40.00:

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This sounds like warning but is meant simply to prepare you: the book has some graphic scenes- not, I think, gratuitously, but disturbing nevertheless. There are also some incredibly beautiful passages- and some that weave the violence with beautiful prose. It is also a work that (purposefully, I think) disorients the reader in the beginning. This is one of the ways in which the Salon is useful; we usually start with a lot of questions about what is going on …and why Morrison seems to make the read so difficult for the reader. Your persistence is needed- but I promise you, you will be rewarded.If this is your first reading of the text, please know that you will read the first chapter and probably feel quite disoriented (just for starters, notice the chapters aren’t numbered- why would Morrison choose not to number the chapters? What effect does this have on your reading?) I have a few suggestions to help you get your bearings: you might want to keep a list of characters (who they are, what you know about them, how they are connected to each other). I also encourage you to write down dates- the novel opens in the year 1873 (third line, first paragraph) – see if you notice when the time changes and make a note of it.

I am an advocate of active reading- your engagement with the text will be strengthened with a close interaction. One of the ways to do this is to write notes directly in the book- question marks in the margin where you don’t understand, exclamation points where you do, highlighting or underlining a passage that strikes you- making note of a passage that is opaque but intriguing, finding connections both within the text and to your own experience. We will talk more about this- mostly find what works for you to help illuminate the text.

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If you have any questions about this study, please contact us.

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place… Nothing outside you can give you any place… In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.”

― Flannery O’Connor , Wise Blood

 

The London Literary Salon had a unique opportunity earlier this summer to view the only full-length documentary on Flannery O’Connor with producer and director Bridget Kurt.  The ensuing discussion was full of questions around Flannery O’Connor’s aesthetic vision: how much does her Catholicism impact her writing? And how does the contemporary reader situate themselves in a framework of faith that we may not share? How does a reader’s immersion in a vision that is framed by a particular faith widen our perspective? O’Conner famously wrote that ‘the topical is poison’ in fiction. She was more interested in exploring the inconsistencies in human souls– the grotesque corners of violence, prejudice and ignorance. She argues that her stories also offer glimpses of grace that are afforded to all people: probing this proposal in her work makes for an energised discussion.

” The Displaced Person” directly engages racism, anti-semitism and xenophobia. This is a longer short story– at 50 pages, this will give us a broader canvas to consider and discuss O’Connor’s writing and vision.

 

Salon Details

• Facilitated by Toby Brothers
• Wednesday evening 7-9:30 pm
• One meeting Intensive August 28th 2019
• Recommended edition: The Complete Stories collection by Flannery O’Connor, Faber & Faber; Main edition (2 April 2009) ; ISBN-10: 9780571245789 (Though the story can also be found on-line)

£35 for Salon Intensive includes background materials and opening notes

STUDY FULL ** Please contact us if you are interested in a similar study in the future**

To register for the study, please use the secure Paypal payment button below to pay £35. Opening notes will be sent shortly after registration.

If you have any questions about this study, please contact us.

Flannery O’Connor is considered to be the master of the American Gothic short story form. Most readers experience discomfort reading her raw and frequently violent stories. Often set in mid-twentieth century southern United States, her stories do not flinch from portraying human hypocrisy, racism, greed and cruelty. Ironically, she is often claimed as a Catholic writer– her faith in some ways integral to her vision. O’Connor was invested in questioning the bizarre nature of humans– and how anxiously the strangeness at the centre of our being is poorly shielded by custom, charity and convention.

Writer Josh Jones (http://www.openculture.com/2019/02/why-should-we-read-flannery-oconnor-an-animated-video-makes-the-case.html) continues this inquiry:

By use of what she called “a reasonable use of the unreasonable” she shows murder, contempt, and deception as shockingly ordinary states of affairs, belying the polite fictions of civility and social niceness. Perhaps no setting could better illuminate the contrasts than the piously violent segregated mid-century American South. O’Connor’s “mastery of the grotesque,” notes the TED-Ed video by Iseult Gillespie, “and her explorations of the insularity and superstitions of the South led her to be classified as a ‘Southern Gothic’ writer.”

The label may fit superficially, but “her work pushed beyond the purely ridiculous and frightening characteristics associated with the genre to reveal the variety and nuance of human character.” O’Connor herself suggested that what set her apart were “the assumptions… of the central Christian mysteries.” Though we need not read her work this way, she grants, there is “none other by which it could have been written.” We might say that her committed belief in the idea of universal human depravity gave her unique insight into the meaninglessness of class and race distinctions. Few writers have taken the idea as seriously, or approached it with more wicked playfulness.

The London Lit Salon Book Club is a monthly book discussion group in South London that reads the finest 20th and 21st century literature from around the world (with the occasional classic thrown in the mix for good measure).

The Book Club’s monthly schedule offers the same serious discussion and professional facilitation as the Salon’s other studies, while providing the opportunity to explore a world of literature for which we might not offer one of our multi-week, in-depth studies. Like all books we read at the Lit Salon, the book club selections speak to basic and enduring questions of what it means to be human.

The Lit Salon Book Club meets on Sunday evenings from 6:30pm – 8:30pm in the comfortable West Norwood (SE27) bungalow of our discussion facilitator Mark Cwik. Meetings for 2018/19 are scheduled for:

07 October — William Trevor’s Two Lives: Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria.

18 November — Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight

06 January 2019 — Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights

03 February 2019 — Sjón’s The Blue Fox

03 March 2019 — Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses

07 April 2019 — Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita

28 April 2019 — Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

26 May 2019 —  Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance

28 July 2019 — Bridget Collins’ The Binding

08 September 2019 — Tessa Hadley’s Late in the Day

 

Our book for 08 September will be Tessa Hadley’s 2019 novel Late in the Day. Waterstones says: “Neatly navigating the ebbs and flows of the relationship between two couples as they weather the impact of a sudden tragedy on the ecosystem of their lives, Tessa Hadley has created a superbly nuanced portrait of friendship and marriage. Echoing the quiet, penetrating observation of Anita Brookner, Hadley writes with subtlety and great skill about the interplay between society, class, history and the passions that shape our everyday experience.”

Michael Upchurch in the Seattle Times says: “Tessa Hadley covers this territory (in Late in the Day) with freshness, subtlety and a deep, shifting empathy. . . . Her prose has the penetrating quality of Henry James at his most accessible (Hadley has written a book-length study of James) and is alert, as Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen were, to how time sculpts, warps or casually destroys us.”

And, from a review in the Guardian: “(Hadley’s) prose – measured, ironic, disarmingly perceptive – picks up on all the contradictions of human existence. . . .There’s a lovely stillness to Hadley’s writing, like an old house with many rooms.”

Registration for the Lit Salon Book Club is in six-month subscriptions of £90. You can also try us out with a one-month payment of £15. See below for payment options.

SPECIAL OFFER: if you’ve not attended before but would like to try us out, we invite you to attend your first meeting free of charge. Please email facilitator Mark Cwik to RSVP and we’ll provide you with location info.

With our friendly atmosphere of collaborative inquiry, high quality and challenging readings, professional facilitation and focused discussions, we are confident in calling the Lit Salon Book Club the best book discussion group in London.

 

SALON DETAILS

• Facilitated by Mark Cwik
• Sunday evenings 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm
• Ongoing monthly study, next meeting 08 September 2019
• Meetings in South London (West Norwood SE27)
• 08 September recommended edition: Late in the Day, by Tessa Hadley; Vintage (2019); ISBN: 9781787331112
• £15 per month, registration in six-month subscriptions, or as one-month trial.

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TO REGISTER for this ongoing study, please use the secure Paypal payment button below to pay £90 for a six-month subscription:

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OR, for monthly payment, use the Paypal button below to pay £15:

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ABOUT THE FACILITATOR: Mark Cwik has been organizing and leading book discussion groups for adults for over twenty years. He currently leads groups in London, Chicago, and Toronto. He was trained as a discussion facilitator while at the Great Books Foundation in Chicago.

“Mark guides our group with patience, wisdom, and thoughtfulness, informed by his vast experience. He leads our discussion with a masterful hand so that each of us brings our own voice to the discussion.  We reach new understandings of the text that we could never have achieved on our own.”– Chicago book group participant.

If you have any questions about this study, please contact us.

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”

 Toni Morrison, writer, professor and essayist on issues including race, gender and forces of life, won the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Beloved is regarded by many as Morrison’s best work, and once you have spent some time in the text, it is easy to understand why. Morrison works to help the reader grasp the psychological devastation wreaked by the institution of slavery by close observation of a community of ex-slaves creating lives in Ohio in the second half of the 19th century.

This text is meaty and evocative, and also quite difficult to read alone. The work also offers endless possibilities in terms of discussion of the formation of self, claiming of self, mother/child relationships, the fury of love, the permeable boundaries between the living and the not living, as well as the more predictable (but no less provocative) issues of race, gender and role of history.

But what you need to know– along with the history and context which will be provided as part of the Salon–is that the writing is so gorgeous. Morrison tackles the most painful aspects of human experience with an honesty and lyricism that will leave you breathless. If this is your first reading of the book, try not to read around too much: many reviews and commentary give away the central traumatic event that Morrison reveals carefully and purposefully in her own time. I think Morrison is very purposeful in the way she tells this story—we will discuss the framing and the narrative progression and her purpose there.

** ONE SPACE REMAINING as of August 9th***

SALON DETAILS 

• Facilitated by Salon Director Toby Brothers
• One- Meeting Salon Intensive  Thursday, September 12th 5-10 PM
• Meeting in Kentish Town
• Cost £45 includes notes and critical resources *reduced cost available for first-time participants*
• RECOMMENDED EDITION: VINTAGE New ed.  ISBN-10: 0099760118

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TO REGISTER, please use the Paypal button below to pay £45.00:

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This sounds like warning but is meant simply to prepare you: the book has some graphic scenes- not, I think, gratuitously, but disturbing nevertheless. There are also some incredibly beautiful passages- and some that weave the violence with beautiful prose. It is also a work that (purposefully, I think) disorients the reader in the beginning. This is one of the ways in which the Salon is useful; we usually start with a lot of questions about what is going on …and why Morrison seems to make the read so difficult for the reader. Your persistence is needed- but I promise you, you will be rewarded.If this is your first reading of the text, please know that you will read the first chapter and probably feel quite disoriented (just for starters, notice the chapters aren’t numbered- why would Morrison choose not to number the chapters? What effect does this have on your reading?) I have a few suggestions to help you get your bearings: you might want to keep a list of characters (who they are, what you know about them, how they are connected to each other). I also encourage you to write down dates- the novel opens in the year 1873 (third line, first paragraph) – see if you notice when the time changes and make a note of it.

I am an advocate of active reading- your engagement with the text will be strengthened with a close interaction. One of the ways to do this is to write notes directly in the book- question marks in the margin where you don’t understand, exclamation points where you do, highlighting or underlining a passage that strikes you- making note of a passage that is opaque but intriguing, finding connections both within the text and to your own experience. We will talk more about this- mostly find what works for you to help illuminate the text.

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If you have any questions about this study, please contact us.

“Call me Ishmael. .  . .”

First published in 1851, Moby Dick ranks on almost any list as one of the greatest works in the English language. Its three famous opening words, and the image of the one-legged Ahab in mad pursuit of the great White Whale, have become cultural icons. This grand—and occasionally grandiose—adventure tale unites the many voices of Herman Melville in a mongrel mix of epic poetry, Shakespearean tragedy, encyclopedic cataloguing, biblical oratory—and not a small dose of comedy. With Moby Dick, Melville presents an insightful study of obsession, madness and charismatic leadership that anticipates many of our contemporary conversations of democracy, cosmopolitanism, capitalism and environmentalism.

“I am half way in the work . . . It will be a strange sort of book, tho’, I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho’ you might get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree;—and to cool the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing, must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves. Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this.” —Herman Melville

SALON DETAILS

• Facilitated by Toby Brothers
• Monday early evenings  17:30 pm – 19:30 pm
  
• Nine meeting study starting September 16th 2019, running until 25 November 2019. (No meetings 7 October nor 18th November)
• Recommended edition: Moby Dick (Norton Critical Edition, Third Edition 2018), by Herman Melville, edited by Herschel Parker; W.W. Norton & Co.; ISBN-13: 978-0393285000
• Location: Kentish Town
• £195 for nine meeting study includes opening notes and weekly preparatory notes

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TO REGISTER for the study, please use the secure Paypal payment button below to pay £195. Opening notes will be sent shortly after registration.

FOR MONDAY STUDY:

 

A few years ago, artist Angela Cockayne and writer Philip Hoare convened and curated a unique whale symposium and exhibition at Peninsula Arts, the dedicated contemporary art space at Plymouth University. This grew into an extraordinary compilation of voices (Tilda Swinton, Stephen Fry…) and art to illuminate each chapter…inspiring and inspired by this vast book.http://www.mobydickbigread.com

From the site:

‘I have written a wicked book’, said Melville when his novel was first published in 1851, ‘and I feel as spotless as the lamb’. Deeply subversive, in almost every way imaginable, Moby-Dick is a virtual, alternative bible – and as such, ripe for reinterpretation in this new world of new media. Out of Dominion was born its bastard child – or perhaps its immaculate conception – the Moby-Dick Big Read: an online version of Melville’s magisterial tome: each of its 135 chapters read out aloud, by a mixture of the celebrated and the unknown, to be broadcast online in a sequence of 135 downloads, publicly and freely accessible.

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If you have any questions about this study, please contact us.

‘The Waste Land’ is the early Modernist poem classic. T. S. Eliot was striving to understand a shattered world post WWI and how the inherited cultural knowledge could offer direction or solace in a broken, mechanistic world. His use of literary and cultural allusions may feel overwhelming at first, but an open mind and supportive discussion will illuminate this gorgeous poem.
At this moment of Modernism, the urge was to separate from the oppressing past (‘Make it new!’ charged Ezra Pound, Eliot’s mentor) but this becomes a double gesture. The attempt to repress or break free from the past ends up haunting the writers and thinkers of the modern period—until they negotiate a link with the myths and images of the past that threatened. ‘Waste Land’ demonstrates this in the specific allusions to past works and in its melding of characters of the past and the present (Cleopatra becoming a modern working woman in ‘A Game of Chess’ for example) as well as the use of myth to reconnect our lost modern psyche to a past of ritual and meaning.

The experience of ‘The Waste Land’ combines a dig through allusions to a sense of what we hear: the journey is impressionistic. Eliot struggles to rediscover primitive, authentic emotion against the falseness of modern life. He employs the poetic technique of multiplying references (thinking of form of sedimentary rock—the layers evoking ages but holding discordant impressions together).

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
—from The Burial of the Dead

Tuesdays 7:00-9:00; I plan to offer a five meeting study of Four Quartets  in this same time slot starting October 29 running until the end of November.

To register, please use the paypal button below to pay £70 for this three meeting study. Upon receipt of payment, I will send you the opening notes, resources and preparation suggestions.

 

The shorter Salon format is a wonderful way to experience the Salon briefly. As we prepare for the fall course offerings, this study will give participants the opportunity to energise the brain with provocative images and philosophical considerations on the tragedy of humanity in the aftermath of WWI.

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If you have any questions about this study, please contact us.

Within a Budding Grove – Vol. II Proust’s A la recherche du Temps Perdu

“When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other’s feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves.”
― Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove

After completing incredibly satisfying studies of Ulysses and Magic Mountain, we have turned to the next big mountain of Modernism, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. We  spent eight weeks reading the first volume of the work– now we turn to Vol. II: Within a Budding Grove (recommended edition: Vintage Classics, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff).  Even if you have not read the first volume, it is possible to pick up from Vol. II and move forward–you can always go back into the first book.  Here is how one Salonista describes the pleasure and work of reading Proust: ” This is a velvet jewel of a book that demands the attention of a lover full of enchantment  and obsession ,we need not get impatient as all good lovers perfect their art in taking their time.”

Reading Proust teaches the reader to observe how the world is experienced, to be aware that although humans are tempted to give greater weight to the perceptual universe, it is the entwining of memory, idealized experience (dreams) and relationships with what our senses perceive that molds our consciousness.

Proust also uses his curious and attentive narrator to uncover the ombre—the part of the self that hides in the shade or shadow. As we come to know the characters in the narrator’s world, each turns out to have aspects that reveal a savagery or laziness or discrepancy that was not what appeared on the surface. Of course, as soon as Proust reflects this to the reader, we recognize this truth of human nature: all carry a shadow, an untoward or simply unmanageable part of the self that we struggle to contain. In Proust’s world, these aspects are equally a part of the coherent self…this has me thinking a great deal about how carefully we construct the social self—and how we temper what simmers beneath the surface.

In Volume II, Proust will continue to explore class structures and awakening sexuality. As we considered in V1, the form of love as Proust conceives it is an entity not necessarily shared between the lovers—but may often be a projection from one onto the love object—and therefore limited in how much that love depends on the actuality of the other in its conception.

PLEASE NOTE THE  LATER STUDY (7:30-9:30) IS NOW FULL (2nd July 2019) – spaces remaining in the 5-7 PM study

Salon Details

• Facilitated by Toby Brothers
• Wednesday afternoons  5-7 PM OR 7:30-9:30 PM
• Eleven Meeting study from September 18th- December 11th (No meetings Oct. 2nd & 23rd)
• Recommended edition: Vintage Classics Moncrief/Kilmartin/Enright  ISBN-13: 978-0099362319
• £230 for eleven meetings includes background materials, literary criticism, opening notes & discussion notes

 Use the correct Paypal button below to register . The cost is £230 for the eleven-week study–this will cover the entire volume. I will send along opening notes and critical resources once I have received your registration. Studies start September 18th. 

For WEDNESDAY afternoons 5-7  pm: 

 

For WEDNESDAY evenings 7:30-9:30  pm:

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If you have any questions about this study, please contact us.

“If his Russian was music, his English was murder.”   ― Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

“Pnin. It’s under two hundred pages! You can probably read it in a couple of years.”    ― Gary Shteyngart

Pnin is the hidden gem of the Nabokov canon, a comedy of academic manners, a funny, engaging and beguiling portrait of an emigré Russian professor at an American college.

Timofey Pnin starts off as a M. Hulot figure, setting off to deliver a lecture to the Cremona Women’s Club – “some two hundred versts west” of Pnin’s home campus of Waindell College (inspired by the author’s tenure at Cornell in upstate New York). But Pnin is on the wrong train. From this farcical beginning, the character of Pnin deepens into a memorable portrait of an emigré in a strange land, seeking quiet in his rented room, job security amid the bewildering campus politics, connection with his colleagues and students while trying to come to terms with the family, lovers and culture which he has lost.

The book comes between the two masterpieces Lolita (completed in1955) and Pale Fire (1962). Between the monstrous Humbert Humbert of Lolita and the deranged Charles Kinbote of Pale Fire, Nabokov created the sane and decent Professor Timofey Pnin. Indeed, Nabokov wrote the first chapter while struggling to complete Lolita, calling it in a letter to a friend a “brief sunny escape from Lolita’s intolerable spell”.

Vladimir Nabokov asserted in his Lectures on Literature that : “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only re-read it.” Pnin is short enough to be read closely in the approved obsessive Nabokovian manner, and re-read, over three Salon sessions. This salon is recommended for readers seeking an accessible introduction to Nabokov and for those salonistas in the midst of huge complex books who might relish an immersion in something short, funny but no less rewarding.

Finally – Pnin is pronounced “P-neen”. Nabokov advised an interviewer “to try the combination “Up North” or still better “Up, Nina!” – leaving out the initial “u”. Pnorth, Pnina, Pnin.”

 

SALON DETAILS

• Facilitated by Marcy Kahan
• Monday afternoons 12:00 pm – 2:00 pm
• Three meeting study 21st, 28th October 4th November
• Recommended edition: Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov; Penguin Modern Classics(2000); ISBN-10: 0141183756
• £75 for three meeting study includes background materials and opening notes

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TO REGISTER for the study, please use the secure Paypal payment button below to pay £75 . Opening notes will be sent shortly after registration.

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If you have any questions about this study, please contact us.

“You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.”
—William Faulkner

There is a strong argument for studying this huge and intimidating text—book list chart-topper of 100 greatest books of all time, critics’ darling, most lauded/least read, the book that many literary academics dedicate their lives to studying—but you will only know for yourself by diving in. I believe the only way to study it is with a group of hungry, curious readers who all contribute to evoking meaning, through their questions as well as their insights.

The good news: reading Ulysses is fun. And I don’t mean in a frustrating, overly-analytical see-how-much-you-know-way. The language is amazing—even when I don’t understand it. Perhaps, especially when I don’t understand it, because meaning sneaks in through more than my critical faculty. Meaning slides in through sound, through the lushness of the language, through the filmy and substantial images, and suddenly I find myself transported from a walk on a beach to a contemplation of the origins of man—thanks, James Joyce.

Any time spent studying Joyce leaves one a better reader—a broader thinker—even if all the references, repetitions, epiphanies and allusions are not immediately understood.

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“Joining the Ulysses salon was one of the best things I have ever done. This was a book I had wanted to read for years but never got past the first section. I had no idea what the salon would be like and was very apprehensive about joining up. But Toby so skillfully guided us through it, her knowledge of the text seemingly inexhaustible, that with her warmth and generosity and sensitivity she got everyone involved and the satisfaction of participating in the salon and in getting an understanding of this marvelous work was immense.”

—Ulysses Salon participant
See more participant feedback here…

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SALON DETAILS

A) DAYTIME: Tuesdays 12-2 PM
B) EVENINGS : Tuesdays 7:30-9:30 PM 

• Both afternoon and evening studies start January 15th and finish June 23rd ; there will be a few special Sunday evening meetings for both afternoon & evening groups to address the longer chapters.
• We will meet for 21 meetings; there will be a few breaks around school half-terms
• Please purchase these editions in preparation for our study:
  • Ulysses, by James Joyce, Annotated Students’ Edition; (Penguin Modern Classics), ISBN-10: 0141184434. (There are many editions of Ulysses — I find this edition is most coherent and the notes and introduction by Declan Kieberd very helpful; as we will constantly be referencing particular passages, having the same edition will be extremely useful.)
  • The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses, by Harry Blamires, ISBN-10: 0415138582
• The total cost for the 20-meeting study, with all notes and resources materials, is £400

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TO REGISTER, Please use the Paypal button below to pay for the study; upon receipt of payment, you will receive opening notes and loads of resources to start the study.

For the daytime study on Tuesdays :

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If you have any questions about this study, please contact us.

“You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.”
—William Faulkner

There is a strong argument for studying this huge and intimidating text—book list chart-topper of 100 greatest books of all time, critics’ darling, most lauded/least read, the book that many literary academics dedicate their lives to studying—but you will only know for yourself by diving in. I believe the only way to study it is with a group of hungry, curious readers who all contribute to evoking meaning, through their questions as well as their insights.

The good news: reading Ulysses is fun. And I don’t mean in a frustrating, overly-analytical see-how-much-you-know-way. The language is amazing—even when I don’t understand it. Perhaps, especially when I don’t understand it, because meaning sneaks in through more than my critical faculty. Meaning slides in through sound, through the lushness of the language, through the filmy and substantial images, and suddenly I find myself transported from a walk on a beach to a contemplation of the origins of man—thanks, James Joyce.

Any time spent studying Joyce leaves one a better reader—a broader thinker—even if all the references, repetitions, epiphanies and allusions are not immediately understood.

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“Joining the Ulysses salon was one of the best things I have ever done. This was a book I had wanted to read for years but never got past the first section. I had no idea what the salon would be like and was very apprehensive about joining up. But Toby so skillfully guided us through it, her knowledge of the text seemingly inexhaustible, that with her warmth and generosity and sensitivity she got everyone involved and the satisfaction of participating in the salon and in getting an understanding of this marvelous work was immense.”

—Ulysses Salon participant
See more participant feedback here…

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SALON DETAILS

A) DAYTIME: Tuesdays 12-2 PM
B) EVENINGS : Tuesdays 7:30-9:30 PM 

• Both afternoon and evening studies start January 15th and finish June 23rd ; there will be a few special Sunday evening meetings for both afternoon & evening groups to address the longer chapters.
• We will meet for 21 meetings; there will be a few breaks around school half-terms
• Please purchase these editions in preparation for our study:
  • Ulysses, by James Joyce, Annotated Students’ Edition; (Penguin Modern Classics), ISBN-10: 0141184434. (There are many editions of Ulysses — I find this edition is most coherent and the notes and introduction by Declan Kieberd very helpful; as we will constantly be referencing particular passages, having the same edition will be extremely useful.)
  • The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses, by Harry Blamires, ISBN-10: 0415138582
• The total cost for the 20-meeting study, with all notes and resources materials, is £400

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TO REGISTER, Please use the Paypal button below to pay for the study; upon receipt of payment, you will receive opening notes and loads of resources to start the study.

For the evening study on Tuesdays:

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If you have any questions about this study, please contact us.