Literature Studies

The legend of the Trojan War is one of the most enduring stories in our culture, inspiring some of our most creative and moving literature and art—from Homer to Shakespeare to Joyce and the present day. The famous Golden Apple and the Trojan Horse are familiar to most everyone, along with the names of Achilles, Odysseus, Hector and Aeneas—and, of course, the ever-enigmatic Helen at the centre of it all.

After 3000 years, Troy and the Trojan War continue to inspire retellings and alt-tellings. Here in 2020, you’ll find at least three current bestselling novels in bookstore windows based on the war and its aftermath, and a steady stream of new translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey receives prominent attention. From Homer’s time onward, the Trojan War has provided a setting for stories of heroism, glory and conquest—and even more often of grief, sorrow and loss.

This Salon study follows on from the  British Museum’s 2020 special exhibition Troy: Myth and Reality. Over the eight weeks of this study, we’ll explore the continuing fascination of Troy, through discussions of five works of literature that span the breadth of the Trojan War story, and a close look at images of key objects from the Troy exhibition.

Central to the myth of Troy is Homer’s Iliad, which we’ll read over four sessions; we’ll also read the Classical Greek plays Iphigeneia at Aulis and The Trojan Women, both by Euripides, and Philoctetes by Sophocles; we’ll finish the study with a modern contribution to the Troy legend, the very well-reviewed novel The Silence of the Girls, by Pat Barker. To round out the study we’ll look at excerpts from ancient source texts that tell the stories of the Golden Apple, the attempts by various heroes to avoid the war, the Trojan Horse, the death of Achilles, and numerous other variations on the Troy myth.

SALON DETAILS

• Facilitated by Mark Cwik
• Thursday evenings 6:00 pm – 8:30 pm GMT
  
• Eight-session study, 09 April to 28 May 2020
  
• Online discussions using Zoom meeting interface. Zoom is free for participants, instructions will be sent upon registration.
  
• Recommended editions:
  
  • The Iliad, by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles, introduction by Bernard Knox; Penguin Classics; ISBN-13: 978-014027536
  • The Complete Euripides Volume I: Trojan Women and Other Plays (Greek Tragedy in New Translations), edited by Peter Burian and Alan Shapiro; Oxford Univ Press (2010); ISBN: 978-0195388671
  • The Complete Euripides Volume II: Iphigenia in Tauris and Other Plays (Greek Tragedy in New Translations), edited by Peter Burian and Alan Shapiro; Oxford Univ Press (2010); ISBN: 978-0195388695
  • The Complete Sophocles Volume II: Electra and Other Plays (Greek Tragedy in New Translations), edited by Peter Burian and Alan Shapiro; Oxford Univ Press (2009); ISBN-13: 978-0195373301
  • The Silence of the Girls, by Pat Barker; Penguin (2019); ISBN-13: 978-0241983201
• £180 for eight-week study.
  

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TO REGISTER for the study, please use the secure Paypal payment button below to pay £180. Opening notes will be sent shortly after registration.

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ABOUT THE FACILITATOR: Mark Cwik has been organizing and leading great books discussion groups for adults for over twenty years in London, Chicago and Toronto. He was trained as a discussion facilitator while at the Great Books Foundation in Chicago and has been a passionate advocate for great books education since attending St. John’s College, Santa Fe and the University of Chicago Basic Program in Liberal Education.

“I’ve been coming to Mark’s discussion groups for about 15 years . . . Mark is amazing in his ability to keep the group functioning smoothly. He asks questions that get to the heart of the piece and he keeps the group focused on those questions. You don’t feel that he’s trying to steer us to any conclusion; he’s in it with us to figure out what the author is saying. He makes everyone feel welcome and their opinions are respectfully heard. He’s always prepared and totally dedicated to advancing our understanding of the great books.” — Chicago group participant.

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

“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.”

― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

I consider this to be one of the greatest works of American Literature. The unnamed protagonist’s search for identity in a world that will not see him gives us as readers an opportunity to try to understand the psychological devastation of racism in its subtle as well as its violent forms and to consider how each of us participates in the fate of all humanity. Ellison weaves in themes and images from Virgil, Dante, Emerson, and TS Eliot while also using the structure and transcendence of Jazz to create a work that haunts and stirs to the core of our experience.

SALON DETAILS

• Facilitated by Toby Brothers
• Monday afternoons 2-4 pm  ** If you are interested in an early-evening study of this work, please contact us
• Seven meetings over seven weeks 
• Meetings in Kentish Town
• Recommended edition: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Penguin Modern Classics (Aug. 2001); ISBN-13: 978-0141184425
• £165 for the seven-week study
  

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TO REGISTER for the study, please use the secure Paypal payment button below to pay £165. Opening notes will be sent shortly after registration. The study is limited to 10 participants. Please contact us if you have any questions.

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From Saul Bellow’s essay:

“Man Underground”

Review of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
published in Commentary (June 1952)

“It is commonly felt that there is no strength to match the strength of those powers which attack and cripple modern mankind. And this feeling is, for the reader of modern fiction, all too often confirmed when he approaches a new book. He is prepared, skeptically, to find what he has found before, namely, that family and class, university, fashion, the giants of publicity and manufacture, have had a larger share in the creation of someone called a writer than truth or imagination that Bendix and Studebaker and the nylon division of Du Pont, and the University of Chicago, or Columbia or Harvard or Kenyon College, have once more proved mightier than the single soul of an individual; to find that one more lightly manned position has been taken. But what a great thing it is when a brilliant individual victory occurs, like Mr. Ellison’s, proving that a truly heroic quality can exist among our contemporaries. People too thoroughly determined and our institutions by their size and force too thoroughly determine can’t approach this quality. That can only be done by those who resist the heavy influences and make their own synthesis out of the vast mass of phenomena, the seething, swarming body of appearances, facts, and details. From this harassment and threatened dissolution by details, a writer tries to rescue what is important. Even when he is most bitter, he makes by his tone a declaration of values and he says, in effect: There is something nevertheless that a man may hope to be. This tone, in the best pages of Invisible Man, those pages, for instance, in which an incestuous Negro farmer tells his tale to a white New England philanthropist, comes through very powerfully; it is tragi-comic, poetic, the tone of the very strongest sort of creative intelligence. In a time of specialized intelligences, modern imaginative writers make the effort to maintain themselves as unspecialists, and their quest is for a true middle-of-consciousness for everyone. What language is it that we can all speak, and what is it that we can all recognize, burn at, weep over, what is the stature we can without exaggeration claim for ourselves; what is the main address of consciousness?

“I was keenly aware, as I read this book, of a very significant kind of independence in the writing. For there is a way for Negro novelists to go at their problems, just as there are Jewish or Italian ways. Mr. Ellison has not adopted a minority tone. If he had done so, he would have failed to establish a true middle-of-consciousness for everyone.”

“Alive, Miss Emily had been a duty and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town.” But now that she’s gone, what secrets will they learn?

Meet Miss Emily. She’s the object of small-town gossip and speculation, a symbol of a lost Southern aristocracy, a victim of her father and the rigid social constraints placed on women, an odd lady who looks down on the small town from her lonely window.  Or worse.

As a character, she’s inspired popular songs, for example this one by the Zombies, which retells the story to focus on Emily’s otherness, her isolation, frustration at missed opportunities, her pride.  Give it a listen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gs-bVMs1LKU

Many have argued that “A Rose for Emily” can be read as a symbolic story about the North and the South of the United States after the American Civil War, which ended slavery and with it the genteel southern aristocracy.

But Faulkner himself said he was “simply writing about people, a story which [I] thought was—was tragic and true because it … came out of the human heart, of human aspiration … of the conflict of conscience with … the Old Adam [evil or reckless side of human nature].”

(transcript from McAleers Literature class, 13 March 1957)

In our discussion we will talk about how we view Emily.  We’ll consider the themes of isolation and privacy, the past and change, and how the way this story is told—much like gossip, out of order and full of conjecture– allows us space to empathize with Emily (or not).  Perhaps we will think about how we as humans face a changing world, the effects of loneliness and pride, and the loss that can come with change.

SALON DETAILS ***In light of the current epidemic, the London Literary Salon is offering VIRTUAL studies- we will be using ZOOM for our seminars– so you can join from anywhere in the world***

• Facilitated by Alison Cable
• Tuesday April 14th 
• One meeting; two hours 4-6 PM GMT
• Meeting on line
• Cost: this study would usually cost £20 — but Alison is requesting all earnings to be donated to our local food banks that have exceptional needs…£1 minimum donation is required to secure your place– any amount is appreciated. Please use the PayPal button below to donate– this completes your registration. 

Recommended edition:  (this can be found in many short story anthologies or on-line: http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/~eng/English_Literature/Rose/el-text-E-Rose.htm

Below you will find some further readings and background information about William Faulkner and his much-anthologized short story. All of this will be useful to our discussion, but don’t get bogged down because the purpose of the Salon is to engage with the words on the page.

William Faulkner speaks on “A Rose for Emily” in 1955:

I feel sorry for Emily’s tragedy; her tragedy was, she was an only child, an only daughter. At first when she could have found a husband, could have had a life of her own, there was probably some one, her father, who said, “No, you must stay here and take care of me.” And then when she found a man, she had had no experience in people. She picked out probably a bad one, who was about to desert her. And when she lost him she could see that for her that was the end of life, there was nothing left, except to grow older, alone, solitary; she had had something and she wanted to keep it, which is bad—to go to any length to keep something; but I pity Emily. I don’t know whether I would have liked her or not, I might have been afraid of her. Not of her, but of anyone who had suffered, had been warped, as her life had been probably warped by a selfish father . . . .

[The title] was an allegorical title; the meaning was, here was a woman who had had a tragedy, an irrevocable tragedy and nothing could be done about it, and I pitied her and this was a salute . . . to a woman you would hand a rose.

From Faulkner at Nagano, ed. Robert Jelliffe (Tokyo: Kenkyusha Ltd., 1956), pp. 70–71.

Here you can listen to Faulkner discussing his work with Edward McAleer’s Literature Class on 13 March 1957:

https://faulkner.lib.virginia.edu/display/wfaudio05_1#wfaudio05_1.6

Here you will find information on Faulkner’s life:

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1949/faulkner/biographical/

This is his Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1949/faulkner/speech/

Find out more about the Southern Gothic style:

http://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/Southern-Gothic-Distinguising-Features

An abundance of information, including links to critical essays, photographs, bibliographies:

http://mwp.olemiss.edu//dir/faulkner_william/

 

 

 

“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 until you have read the whole book: 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. You are strongly encouraged to read the whole novel before the study begins– and then we will consider it section by section. This study is appropriate for first-time readers of Beloved as well as those who have previously read and studied Beloved in the Salon.

 

SALON DETAILS 

• Facilitated by Salon Director Toby Brothers
• Four-week study: April  21st, 28th, May 19th, 26th
• Meeting in Kentish Town
• Cost £105 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 £105.00:

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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.

Reflections from a previous study participant:

“Beloved is one of the most beautiful and impactful books I’ve ever read. The impact I got in my first reading (I had recently become a parent), but the lyrical beauty I didn’t fully appreciate until I studied it with you. It was really interesting to re-read such a complex book at a different time in my life (I’m such a slow reader that I tend not to spend time re-reading). My first reading of Beloved left me thinking that forgiveness (or redemption) was perhaps not possible, the crime against humanity was too great. My second reading left me with a feeling of the possible and I felt some hope for humanity shine through that I hadn’t quite picked up on before. Thank you for guiding me through that experience. I have students of many different nationalities and ethnicities. I think Toni Morrison has helped me to start unpicking some of my own biases and preconceptions, for which I am grateful.”

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

Jane Austen needs no introduction or explanation. She’s a writer unmatched in her ability to parse the workings of the human psyche and the nuances of social interactions. And her novels are simply delightful. In this four-week study we’ll read two of her best: Persuasion and Emma.

 

SALON DETAILS

• Facilitated by Mark Cwik
• Monday evenings 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm GMT
  
• Four-week study, 27 April to 18 May 2020
  
• Online discussions using Zoom meeting interface. Zoom is free for participants, instructions will be sent upon registration.
  
• Recommended editions (these are recommended, but if you have others on hand, feel free to use those):
  • Persuasion by Jane Austen; Penguin Classics (2003); ISBN 13: 978-0141439686
  • Emma, by Jane Austen; Penguin Classics (2003): ISBN 13: 978-0141439587
• £105 for four-week study.
  

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TO REGISTER for the study, please use the secure Paypal payment button below to pay £105. Opening notes will be sent shortly after registration.

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ABOUT THE FACILITATOR: Mark Cwik has been organizing and leading discussions of great literature with adults for over twenty years in London, Chicago and Toronto. He was trained as a discussion facilitator while at the Great Books Foundation in Chicago and has been a passionate advocate for great books education since attending St. John’s College, Santa Fe and the University of Chicago Basic Program in Liberal Education.

“I’ve been coming to Mark’s discussion groups for about 15 years . . . Mark is amazing in his ability to keep the group functioning smoothly. He asks questions that get to the heart of the piece and he keeps the group focused on those questions. You don’t feel that he’s trying to steer us to any conclusion; he’s in it with us to figure out what the author is saying. He makes everyone feel welcome and their opinions are respectfully heard. He’s always prepared and totally dedicated to advancing our understanding of the great books.” — group participant.

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

“I am nothing to you. You say I am wilderness. I am. Is that a tremble on your mouth, in your eye? Are you afraid? You should be.”

― Toni Morrison, A Mercy

Morrison has commented that she wrote A Mercy  to explore a time before slavery was identified with race. This may help readers to consider race more as ‘an interplay with other social determiners, such as gender and class. Moreover, we must resist the trigger reaction that interprets “race” to reference black-white relations, given that in colonial America another different people lived here who were subjected to biological mayhem as well as painstakingly plotted genocide” (Tally & Stave, intro to Critical Approaches: Toni Morrison’s A Mercy) .

Please notice as you read the differing perspectives and narrative styles that tell the story. Notice also how the land—the specific geographical settings—impact character and tellings. Notice how you read different paradigms: for example, what is ownership to one character is different to another….

SALON DETAILS 

• Facilitated by Salon Director Toby Brothers
• Two-week study: May 5th & 12th 5-7:30
• Virtual Meetings using ZOOM
• Cost £60 includes notes and critical resources *reduced cost available for first-time participants*
• RECOMMENDED EDITION: A Mercy, by Toni Morrison, Vintage (2009). ISBN-13: 978-0099502548

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TO REGISTER, please use the Paypal button below to pay £60.00

A Mercy  is a study of displaced peoples. Instead of focusing on (and singling out) the experience of black Americans , Morrison chooses a moment in the history of the United States—in the moment before this land comes to be called the United States—and explores the lives of the collection of people creating a home in wilderness. These ideas are connected to post-colonial theory, race issues and immigrant cultural adaptations—but perhaps what is new in our understanding now is how prevalent and constant the loss of home is for peoples across history.

We may each of an aspect of displacement in our lives; this may open us to a kind of understanding—but I believe through literature—the carefully evoked experience of others—we may start to understand with greater complexity the precarious experience of the displaced identity—and the strategies and creativity one uses to respond to this upheaval.

Salon Weekend Retreats

Building on the success of our London-based studies, we are excited to offer travel studies that place participants in locales that reflect and contextualize the literature. Journeying together to beautiful sites, the London Lit Salon retreat offers a more intensive immersion in the book while opening the mind to a part of the world illuminated through the beauty of the language.

A Portrait of  A Lady by Henry James

The book is a painted portrait or even a kaleidoscope.  We watch and guess what Isabel will do. But like a portrait, she is (perhaps) caught in a frame and frozen by the artistry –or the terms of her world.

Previous studies have included considerations of gender roles, the negotiated space between self and other, the corruption or freedom offered by privilege, the challenge of looking at nationalities in generalizations (and the tempting ease to do so), the ways in which humans reveal themselves…these Salon discussions are full of wonder: the meeting of the gathered minds and the provoking text is a powerful thing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson seems to echo in the lines and characters of Henry James, Isabel in particular: “You think of me the child of my circumstances: I make my circumstance…I—this thought which is called I, –is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax. The mould is invisible, but the world betrays the shape of the mould. You call it the power of circumstance, but it is the power of me.” –from Emerson’s essay The Transcendentalist 

Our study of PoAL may include a consideration of this quote in light of Isabel’s life and choices: how much do we make ourselves? How does the world impose itself on the individual in the act of self-creation?

 

Salon Details and Registration

• Weekend Meeting :May 15th-17th 2020
• Meeting in Rye–The Mermaid Inn and (as weather permits) garden at Henry James House
• Facilitated by Salon Director Toby Brothers
• Cost £165 includes notes and critical resources; rooms at the Mermaid range from £90 per night to £125
• RECOMMENDED EDITION: Norton Critical Edition Oct. 2017; ISBN-10: 0393938530

Jan 2020: THIS STUDY IS NOW FULL– please contact us to be placed on the wait list

To register for the Salon study, please use the Paypal button below to pay £165: (Please pay for the  room directly to The Mermaid Inn once your registration has been confirmed):

About the Mermaid Inn–

This famous and historic Inn is a real find– it is usually booked out but we were able to secure three singles for GBP 90 each per night including breakfast, and 10 double-for-single rooms for GBP 125 each per night for a total of 13 rooms (out of 31 total rooms in the hotel).  There are two lounges for meetings offered at no cost.  WJ’s historic house is 1 minute walk away.

See images and further details here: https://www.mermaidinn.com/about-the-hotel/

 

From J. Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

“The question (could a novel be art) were…framed in terms of technique, but the ideal was no longer just to promote the novel’s ability to communicate more and more details about more and more things, but also to have an aesthetic shape or effect that would be intended by the author and felt by the reader as consciously graceful, beautiful or ‘right.’  Foremost proponent of these ideas was Henry James…” p. 134

“Everything that Isabel has learned about love and marriage growing up in the United States turns out to be wrong—in Europe, marriage is a pure commodity relationship, and it is the fate girls to be bought, sold, and dominated. Their only choices are to accept their fate knowingly or undergo it without understanding it. ..In Pofa Lady James does what he intended to do…uses intense psychological analysis and careful depiction of settings to fill the spots where the vulgar might have been. “ p. 135

“H. James …recognized that, as vital and satisfying as the English novel was, English novels were missing something that French novels possessed—psychological refinement and depth. …HJ wanted to write…important novels about the progress of the inner life, in which the climax might be only a silent recognition by the protagonist that she has made a commitment fatal to her happiness. Readers had to be educated to understand the weight of such subterranean drama…” p.136

“I am nothing to you. You say I am wilderness. I am. Is that a tremble on your mouth, in your eye? Are you afraid? You should be.”

― Toni Morrison, A Mercy

Morrison has commented that she wrote A Mercy  to explore a time before slavery was identified with race. This may help readers to consider race more as ‘an interplay with other social determiners, such as gender and class. Moreover, we must resist the trigger reaction that interprets “race” to reference black-white relations, given that in colonial America another different people lived here who were subjected to biological mayhem as well as painstakingly plotted genocide” (Tally & Stave, intro to Critical Approaches: Toni Morrison’s A Mercy) .

Please notice as you read the differing perspectives and narrative styles that tell the story. Notice also how the land—the specific geographical settings—impact character and tellings. Notice how you read different paradigms: for example, what is ownership to one character is different to another….

SALON DETAILS 

• Facilitated by Salon Director Toby Brothers
• Two-week study: June 23rd & June 30th 7-9:30
• Meeting in Kentish Town
• Cost £60 includes notes and critical resources *reduced cost available for first-time participants*
• RECOMMENDED EDITION: A Mercy, by Toni Morrison, Vintage (2009). ISBN-13: 978-0099502548

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TO REGISTER, please use the Paypal button below to pay £60.00

 

A Mercy  is a study of displaced peoples. Instead of focusing on (and singling out) the experience of black Americans , Morrison chooses a moment in the history of the United States—in the moment before this land comes to be called the United States—and explores the lives of the collection of people creating a home in wilderness. These ideas are connected to post-colonial theory, race issues and immigrant cultural adaptations—but perhaps what is new in our understanding now is how prevalent and constant the loss of home is for peoples across history.

We may each of an aspect of displacement in our lives; this may open us to a kind of understanding—but I believe through literature—the carefully evoked experience of others—we may start to understand with greater complexity the precarious experience of the displaced identity—and the strategies and creativity one uses to respond to this upheaval.

“Millions of things came back to her. Atoms danced apart and massed themselves. But how did they compose what people called a life? She clenched her hands and felt the hard little coins she was holding. Perhaps there’s ‘I’ at the middle of it, she thought; a knot; a centre; and again she saw herself sitting at her table drawing on the blotting paper, digging little holes from which spokes radiated. Out and out they went; thing followed thing, scene obliterated scene.”

–Virginia Woolf, The Years

 

Each study in St Ives is magical. The light, the smell and sound of the sea gilds the intensive study with a unique sense of stepping into another world. This study of The Years, the last novel published by Virginia Woolf while she was still alive, expands our time in Cornwall to five days as requested by past participants. We will meet Wednesday evening for our first exploration with six more meetings spread over the coming days to allow time for enjoyment of the natural and cultural gems offered in this beautiful place. This will be the Salon’s first study of The Years; this study will have the exploratory energy that a first Salon study offers.

IN LIGHT OF THE CURRENT PANDEMIC, the dates for this study are shifted: October 14th-18th 2020 …there  are three spaces available.

 

The Years is described as a family saga–and is often considered more accessible than other works by Woolf. With the experience of many studies of To The Lighthouse, Between the Acts, The Waves and Mrs Dalloway, I have come to relish the subtle profundity beneath the language experimentation and interior explorations that Woolf offers. The Years engages history– the personal history of a family, the mantel of history of a people, the sense of a denigrated future in the shadow of historical myths and mistakes–and considers how various characters negotiate this troubled inheritance. Woolf moves deftly between the individual and the larger cultural landscapes–illuminating how one person can exist in their vulnerable selfhood amidst the waves of the world around them.

 

To understand this book, you will want to read with a wide awake mind and then re-read once you have played on the surface of plot and character. Notice how the descriptions along the edges—the fragments, the other stories invoked, the changing weather passages—all comment on and expand the central narrative. We will also consider essays from her work, The Pargiters — the theoretical framework that Woolf wrote alongside The Years but then excluded from the text. This has become available in Mitchell Leaska’s edition: “The Pargiters is interesting in its own right for the insight it offers into Woolf’s politics, which she expresses more bluntly in the novel-essay than she ever had before.” (R. Higney, Modernism Lab)

 

SALON DETAILS: 

• Five-day Meeting in St Ives — approximately 14 hours of study
• Meeting St Ives Cornwall; facilitated by Salon Director Toby Brothers
• Cost £325 includes notes and critical resources (transport and housing not included)
• RECOMMENDED EDITION: The Years by Virginia Woolf (Vintage Classics Woolf Series) Paperback – 6 Oct 2016 ISBN-10: 1784872237
• If possible, please also purchase The Pargiters–  this book is difficult to find and tends to be pricey– if you can not find an affordable edition, please contact us— I have a few editions for purchase or loan.

To register for the Salon study, please use the Paypal button below to pay £325: (Please pay for the  room directly to No4St Ives once your registration has been confirmed):

*Apologies– it appears that this Paypal button is only working for those with a Paypal account– I am working with Paypal to fix this issue– in the meantime, if you wish to register and don’t have nor want a PP account, please Contact Us directly.

‘A brilliant fantasia of all Time’s problems, age and youth, change and permanence, truth and illusion’ The Times Literary Supplement

The Years is the story of the Pargiter family – their intimacies and estrangements, anxieties and triumphs – mapped out against the bustling rhythms of London’s streets during the first decades of the twentieth century, as their Victorian upbringing gives way to a new world, where the rules of etiquette have shifted from the drawing room to the air-raid shelter. Virginia Woolf’s penultimate novel is a celebration of the resilience of the individual amid time, change, life, death and renewal.

 

Virginia Woolf:  “If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills – then my bowl without doubt stands upon this memory.  It is of lying in bed, half-asleep, haf awake, in bed in the nursery at St Ives.  It is of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking, one, two, one two, behind a yellow blind […}.  If I were a painter I should paint these impressions in pale yellow, silver, and green.  There was the pale yellow blind; the green sea; and the silver of the passion flowers.”

“Here is the past and all its inhabitants miraculously sealed as in a magic tank.”

“The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surace of a deep river.  Then one sees through the surface to the depths.  The past sometimes presses so close that you can feel nothing else.”

—“Sketch of the Past,” begun in June 1939.

 

St IVES:  Virginia Woolf spent much of her childhood in St. Ives.  The London Literary Salon invites you to join us in St Ives to explore this lovely coastal town and have it serve as a prism through which we will explore Woolf’s perspectives on landscape, domesticity, historical inheritance and identity in her novel The Years. We have already completed four magical weekends with Woolf’s writings in the environment that inspired it– this is an incredible experience!

You will have the opportunity to  visit the iconic Tate St Ives gallery overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, built between 1988 and 1993 on the site of an old gasworks, and there will be an optional boat trip to Godrevy Lighthouse.

We may also look at Talland House, now privately owned, her childhood summer home.  For several months of the year the elegant house overlooking St Ives Bay would be the Stephens’ family home until 1895 when Virginia’s mother Julia Stephen died.  Although the complete family never returned to St Ives following their mother’s death, her children travellled back in 1905 following the death of their father in 1904.

Accommodation:  We are working with No4 St Ives which is just steps from Talland House and has an elevated position overloooking St Ives Bay.  It is a 5 minute walk from the beach and St Ives Town Centre.

Approximate cost: 

 Rooms at No4 St Ives range from £110-£140 per night– if the room is shared, the cost is halved; breakfast included. Some of us plan to stay Sunday night as well to be able to enjoy an extra day in this beautiful site. The entire cost is to be paid upfront. If for some reason you are unable to attend, we will work to find someone to replace you & reimburse you for the room but can not guarantee that is possible. The Salon cost may be applied to a later study. 

Train cost is approx.  £70  each way(cheaper if bought earlier) 

Salon cost is  £325: We will meet around 14 hours over the five days. The first meeting starts at 5:45 Wednesday evening; the last meeting is scheduled for 9:30-11:30 Sunday morning. On previous trips, many have stayed in St Ives through Sunday evening to have time for further exploration and reflection. Please discuss this option with Sue and Mike from No4 St Ives if you are interested. 

We will enjoy dinner out on Wednesday and Saturday…other costs will include the optional boat trip & visit to the St Ives gallery. 

Getting there:  The train from London takes just over five hours, with one change at St Erth for the branch line to St Ives.

This event and other in-depth explorations of  Virginia Woolf and her works can be found on the website of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain

 

Part of the challenge when reading Woolf is to understand it is not the action that matters but the impression of thoughts; it is by attending to the pattern and signification of thoughts and impressions that we will uncover meaning, innovation. As one of the primary modernist writers, Woolf plays with language; testing its ability to truly reflect human experience by recording the life of the mind not just action. Her narrative form reflects one of the characteristics of Modernist writing in its shifting centre of narrative perspective reflecting a questioning of ultimate and moral authority that characterized the time with the dissolution of Imperialism and absolute values.

 

Writing from the edge of the violent shift from Victorian to Modernist era, the loss of an old world in the violent destruction of war and massive social change, Woolf’s ambivalence is demonstrated in her work. She struggles against the boundaries and structures of the Victorian era while holding a great longing and nostalgia for the noble traditions of the time.

 

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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 5:00-7:00 PM 

• Both afternoon and evening studies start January 12th and finish June 20th (combined Sunday evening) 2021 ; 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 £420

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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 :

For the early evening  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

After wandering through these rich pages with many wonderful readers, I am keen to offer a study of Ulysses for those who have already passed through once (or more) and are ready to dig deeper. The reading schedule will be the same, but we will approach with an understanding of the structure already in mind. This will allow us to flesh out the themes from the start of the work and engage more thoroughly the historical, social and aesthetic structures that Joyce inhabits and overturns. Hopefully this will also give seasoned readers the opportunity to feel grounded in the text and discover motifs, connections and explorations that they may have missed in the madness of the first reading.

If you have not previously read Ulysses, please join either the afternoon study or the early evening study.

 

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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

• Studies start January 12th and finish June 20th (Sunday combined meeting) ; 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 21-meeting study, with all notes and resources materials, is £420

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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.

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