From Beowulf through The Odyssey, our study of the classics informs our understanding of the role of art and literature in forming our sense of ourselves and human history. This will be the first Salon study of the Oresteia so will have the energy of new and...
Già volgeva il mio disio e ’l velle, sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa, l’amor che move ’l sole e l’altre stelle. Now my will and my desire were turned, like a wheel in perfect motion, by the love that moves the sun and the other stars. These breathtaking...
While many have described Bleak House as Dickens’ most sophisticated work, indeed his best work, it is not usually listed as the best known of Dickens’ body of writing. This may be in part due to the size of the text- at over 900 pages, it is an intimidating and often...
Daniel Deronda, published in 1876, is George Eliot’s final—and most controversial novel. Eliot had spent much of her life exploring the connections and separations between cultures and faiths. Her interest in Judaism and the Jewish people of England is played out in...
“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,...
Absalom, Absalom! is said to be Faulkner’s most difficult but most brilliant work. Absalom presents the story of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi...
“He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear.” –WIlliam...
I would recommend courses led by Toby to anyone who wants to look at a text in detail in a study group
I was certainly surprised at how much I was thrown off balance by these two astounding writers…I look forward to returning for more
We all came to the group with different backgrounds and interests but Mark has skillfully guided us through a stimulating programme of Greek literature.
I always leave the meetings with a much broader understanding of what we are reading than when I arrived
Everyone feels they get heard and therefore that each of us has a contribution to make
In all of the courses I have attended I have felt a bond within the group, and this contributes significantly to the quality of the discussions
Lovely, intimate groups with in-depth discussions, lots of learning, and friendships are made for life there
I’ve read things I’d never dared read before. I’ve made new friends and met really interesting people.
“Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts
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Vintage International 1990 Marc J. Cohen
“Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both:—touch and touch of that which is the citadel of the central I-Am’s private own: not spirit, soul; the liquorish and ungirdled mind is anyone’s to take in any any darkened hallway of this earthly tenement. But let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too. ”
― William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
Absalom, Absalom! is said to be Faulkner’s most difficult but most brilliant work. Absalom presents the story of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, “who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him.”
Described as ‘hard-core Faulkner’, one review says: “The words and writing are critically acclaimed since your parents were in school. The examples of how a war can raze an entire culture’s edifice of identity are compelling, each person’s doom and curse being common among her kin and her countrymen: ghosts and sex and violence and cruelty, gut wrenching drama to challenge any soap opera or miniseries or movie. There are themes and studies aplenty within the nightmare realm of Faulkner’s masterpiece.”
Absalom, Absalom! includes characters and shadows from The Sound and the Fury but delves more deeply into the surrounding world and Southern inheritance that S&F traces. The multiple voices and perspectives each clamor to have their story told, to get to the heart of how they understood the fecund and exhausted world and their role in it. Faulkner orchestrates shifting sympathies and the reader is struck with how deeply immersed we become with the characters and the unfolding mystery at the heart of the work. Racism and its imbedded structure in Southern history at first seem to be the background against which the drama of the story is played out; but ultimately slavery and its de-humanization of all involved becomes the project of the book to explore—although from an unusual and intimate angle.
This book will offer the Salon much to discuss in its gorgeous language and complex subjects: racial identification, pride, identity, impact of history on family, the drive of revenge, the struggle to claim selfhood in a broken world. . .
SALON DETAILS
Facilitated by Salon Director Toby Brothers
Seven- meeting study starting 5th October (No meeting 19 October nor 9 November)
VIRTUAL meetings– on ZOOM
Recommended edition: Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner, Vintage Classics edition (1995); ISBN-: 978-0099475118
Antigone, Medea, Clytemnestra, Phaedra, Electra, Hecuba—it's remarkable that some of the most memorable female characters
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Clytemnestra, by John Collier, 1882
Antigone, Medea, Clytemnestra, Phaedra, Electra, Hecuba—it’s remarkable that some of the most memorable female characters in drama might first have appeared on stage before an audience of only men (with the roles played by men, as well). We are not sure whether women were even allowed to attend theatre performances in 5th century Athens. We do know, at least, that these fascinating characters were created in a place and time where women had little place in public life.
It’s all the more fascinating, then, that the playwrights who brought them to life gave a voice to such noble, clever, passionate—and above all, strong—women who were keenly aware of the contraints placed on them by the society in which they lived. Whether in doing so the writers were portraying what they desired, or what they feared, is much less clear.
In the six weeks of this study we’ll read six of the finest Classical-age Greek dramas, from Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides–the latter, especially, showed a keen interest in the lives of women: Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Antigone and Electra, and three plays by Euripides, the Medea, Hippolytus and Bacchae.
Six-meeting study, 05 October to 16 November 2020 (no meeting 26 October)
Online discussions using Zoom meeting interface. Zoom is free for participants, instructions will be sent upon registration.
Recommended edition:
The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; edited by Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm; ISBN-13: 978-0812983098
£150 for six-week study, includes notes and questions for preparation.
TO REGISTER for the study, please use the secure Paypal payment button below to pay £150.
ABOUT THE FACILITATOR: Mark Cwik has been organizing and leading discussions of great literature for over twenty years in London, Chicago and Toronto. He specializes in works from the ancient, mythic and religious world. 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.
If you have any questions about this study, please contact us.
“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly
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“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch
In Middlemarch, Eliot probes the complexity of human nature and studies the idea of vocation: the call to find meaning through work in a provincial world.
I love the dilemma–how is an intelligent woman going to be intellectually stimulated in a time when there are so few options for women? This reflects Eliot’s own story: why does she write under a male pseudonym? Dorothea settles on marriage to an older man, a scholar and (she hopes) a mentor–ironically making an intellectual choice about the desire of the heart. What ensues is her struggle to be the person she aspires to being a world which values none of the ideals that interest her.
I love how psychological Eliot is, how interested she is in the inner workings of people’s minds. Why do Dorothea and Lydgate make the choices they do? Why do they choose people so unsuited to them? As in Daniel Deronda, Eliot is very interested in intellectual/spiritual passion–how religious scholarship can inform or transform a life–but while she is attracted to the dispassionate discipline of religious wisdom, she also knows that earthly love is what sustains us. This tension, between moral ideal and human behaviour, is the drive of the novel and probably makes the most sense in its historical context: a time of great intellectual inquiry, the Victorian obsession with self-improvement. Yet it isn’t that different from the self-improvement obsessions of our own time…
Seven-meeting study, 22 October to 3rd December 2020
Online discussions using Zoom meeting interface. Zoom is free for participants, instructions will be sent upon registration.
Recommended edition: Middlemarch by George Eliot (Norton Critical Editions) Paperback – 26 Jan. 2000 ISBN-10 : 9780393974522
£170 for six-week study, includes notes and questions for preparation.
TO REGISTER for the study, please use the secure Paypal payment button below to pay £170 (Please contact us if you prefer to pay by direct bank transfer).
I admit that even when I knew I had to dive into the text it took me 3 or four starts. Eliot does not make the work easy to enter: some find Dorothea annoying in her earnestness, others find the narrative repetitive. We are entering a different world and I found once I had the rhythm of the writing, the story was so compelling that the earlier frustrations melted away. The Prelude sets up epic possibilities for female roles by using Saint Theresa and her life as an example of a’ life beyond self’. While this first page left me awed with its spiritual grandeur, I had a hard time finding my place in this elevated conversation. But on rereading, I found that Eliot had understood my concern. What the prelude considers is a very recognisable struggle, for me, for women, for anyone who has dreamed large dreams and found that the quotidian world does not always make room for grand design.
From the Prelude:
“That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.”
