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.
  

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

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.

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

Socrates was described as poor and ugly, called a “numbfish,” compared to a satyr—and that was just his friends talking. We are told he was a courageous soldier, the best drinker in the house, who never lost an argument in his life. He seems to have spent most of his days walking around Athens and talking. And he was tried and executed for corrupting the youth of Athens and for impiety against the city’s gods. He never wrote a thing, claimed not to be a teacher, and yet he is considered a founder of western philosophy. Who was this enigmatic and seemingly-contradictory man, and why are we still talking about him today?

Socrates is known to us mostly through the writings of his follower Plato. In the six weeks of this study we’ll read four of Plato’s dialogues that together paint a rich portrait of Socrates, his character and ideas. In the first of our dialogues, the Meno, Socrates and the title speaker Meno search for a solid definition of virtue, and discover themselves confronted by some of philosophy’s most basic and profound questions: what can we know, how can we know it, how can we teach, how can we learn? The three dialogues Apology, Crito and Phaedo take us through the trial and death of Socrates, as Socrates makes an impassioned defence of his way of life and prepares to face the unjust sentence declared against him.

Plato’s dialogues are very approachable—and a great deal of fun to read together as a group. If you are new to reading Plato—the best way to start reading the dialogues is simply to start reading them. For new and veteran readers alike, every reading unfolds more depth and complexity.

SALON DETAILS

• Facilitated by Mark Cwik
• Friday evenings 5:00 pm – 7:30 pm GMT
  
• Six-week study, 10 April to 15 May 2020
  
• Online discussions using Zoom meeting interface. Zoom is free for participants, instructions will be sent upon registration.
  
• Recommended edition: Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo, by Plato, translated by G.M.A. Grube, revised by John M. Cooper; Hackett Publishing Co, Inc; 2nd edition (2002); ISBN-13: 978-0872206335
• £125 for six-week study.
  

TO REGISTER for the study, please use the secure Paypal payment button below to pay £125. Opening notes will be sent shortly after registration.

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.” — group participant.

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
  

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.

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 

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.
  

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

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.

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