Hello all–apologies for the repeat info– but when I sent out the newsletter last week, the website was TIRED and when people tried to access the information, they found it unavailable. So writing to say I believe it is fixed…and now would be a good time to sign up for the following if you are interested….
See you in the pages…
Three studies coming to Paris in April:
Friday April 4th: Two short stories by Alice Munro & Eudora Welty (see Events page for more details)
Saturday April 5th: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann –first third
Sunday April 6th: The Magic Mountain –second third (those who completed the first third in February have priority for registration)
SHORT STORIES Salon Intensive
Why I Live at the P.O. (1941)
Boys and Girls (1968)
Both of these works are available on line using the links to the titles.
Cost: 30.00 euro (includes opening notes and critical work)
April 4th: 6:30- 10 PM
I have loved the craft and world evoked by Alice Munro for years–I first taught her work Lives of Girls and Women in a very energetic and popular Salon in Paris some years ago.
I suggest that Munro explores juxtaposed worlds in her fiction…that she uses her characters to probe the relationships between psychological spaces and the outside world.
Munro’s award of the Nobel Prize for literature is the perfect excuse to offer a study based on her short stories. We will look closely at both short stories in this single meeting and consider each writer’s unique voice in probing the intimacy and peculiarities of the human heart.
Eudora Welty offers a different world, a different rhythm, perhaps a sharper comic edge in “Why I live at the P.O.”. It is easy to be seduced by the humour there– but there is also a disruptive family event explored and analysed. There is always an outsider in any group–this is at its most awkward in family structures–but often the outsider has the widest view…
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann–first and second third
Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain has been grouped with the two other giant Modernist classics Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past as the formative novels of the Modernist era. A first dip in to the text reveals an accessible, lilting narrative that once in, you find yourself considering time, society, passion, memory from the strange angle of remove that characterises the perspective of the invalid. Mann’s work is also deeply political; placed before WWI but written between WWI and WWII, MM engages questions of Nationalism and nostalgia with the shadow of future events shifting the weight of the ironic stance that Mann employs.
For the first third study, please read through “Encyclopedia” (pg. 299 in the Woods ed.)
For the second third- please read through the chapter entitled “Snow” (pg. 590 in the Woods ed.)
We will need some time to encounter the richness and length of this work: the study will extend over three meetings: following dates will be in May and June. The cost for each five hour meeting (critical resources, session notes and historical/cultural background readings included) is 45 euro.
RECOMMENDED EDITION EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY trans. by John e. Woods
To register, please use the paypal button below to sign up for this study. Email me at lit salon@gmail.com if you have any questions. Upon receipt of registration, we will send you the opening notes and details. Welcome to this immersion in the language and philosophy of one the 20th century’s greatest thinkers.
