Tutor: Nicholas Bellinson
Dates: February 20 & 21
Cost: $180
This session is FULL

“Tis the times’ plague, when madmen lead the blind.” Gloucester’s words evoke our own helplessness in the face of Shakespeare’s apocalyptic tragedy. Spend a weekend coming to terms with King Lear’s sublime poetry and its fractured familial and political relationships.

Reading Assignments: Entire play to be read before the first class.

Suggested edition: William Shakespeare, King Lear (New York: Signet 1998). ISNB-13: 978-0-451-52693-9; N.B. There are significant differences among editions, so please try to get this one or another “conflated” version.

Tutor: Erica Beall
Date: February 20 & 21
Cost: $180
This session is FULL

Inspired by works from very different eras, these authors each have something profound to tell us about what art can show us, offering gorgeous language to express their encounters with the works that inspired their poems. To enrich our reading of the poems, images of the art will be provided so that these too can enter into our discussion.

Reading Assignments:

1. John Keats’ Ode on A Grecian Urn
   Image: Sosibios Vase (photograph and Keats’ sketch)
2. W. H. Auden’s Musee dex Beaux Arts and William Carlos Williams’ Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.
   Image: Pieter Bruegel, The Fall of Icarus
3. Anne Sexton, Starry Night
   Image: Vincent Van Gogh, Starry Night

Suggested edition: Any full text (available in print or online).

Tutor: Khafiz Kerimov
Date: March 6 & 7
Cost: $180
This session is FULL

In this seminar we will read and analyze Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina with close attention to structure (and especially the novel’s somewhat mysterious ending), style, ideas, and the cultural context. Some of the themes that we may discuss in the seminar are the nature of passion; coincidences in human life; the meaning of faith, redemption, and forgiveness; and finally the 19th-century Russian culture.

Reading Assignments:

1. Parts I–III
2. Parts III–VI
3. Parts VII–VIII

Suggested edition: Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Penguin Books 2000. ISBN-13: 978-0143035008.

Tutor: Louis Petrich
Date: March 6 & 7
Cost: $180
This session is FULL

Reading Assignments:

1. John, Chapters 1–8
2. John, Chapters 9–17
3. John, Chapters 18–21 and first, second, and third letters

Participants will discuss the Gospel of John, and his three letters, as works of literature, philosophy, and theology, accessible through shared reason, put to common use in interpretation. John’s Gospel contains the most intimate portrayal of Jesus, the most heated theological arguments with the Jews, and extended teachings about oneness and love.

Suggested edition: Any is acceptable.

Tutor: Erica Beall
Date: March 20 & 21
Cost: $180
This session is FULL

In these essays, Arendt takes on political philosophy’s most pressing questions and fundamental concepts. A student of Martin Heidegger and an accomplished scholar of ancient political philosophy, Arendt offers a profoundly compelling analysis of the origins and meaning of the political crises facing the modern world.

Reading Assignments:

1. “What is Authority?”
2. “What is Freedom?”
3. “Truth and Politics”

Suggested edition: Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future. Penguin Classics. ISBN-13: 978-0143104810.

Tutor: David Townsend
Date: March 20 & 21
Cost: $180
This session is FULL

Louise Glück, born in New York City in 1943, is one of the best contemporary poets, appropriately honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020. She brings classical themes to life with technical precision, sensitivity, and insight. Her themes range from love, sensuality, and family relationships, to divorce, aging, sorrow and death. The Nobel Prize Committee underscored “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”

Reading Assignments:

1. “Gretel in Darkness” p. 61
   “The Triumph of Achilles” p. 159
   “Confession” p. 209
   “Terminal Resemblance” pp. 234–235
   “Celestial Music” pp. 240–241
   “Matins”--“Forgive me if I say I love you....” p. 255
   “The Doorway” p. 275
   “Presque Isle” p. 291
2. “Parable of the King” p. 312
   “Departure” p. 314
   “Ithaca” p. 315
   “Circe’s Power” p. 338
   “Nostos” p. 342
   “Telemachus’ Confession” p. 347
   “The Muse of Happiness” pp. 466–467
   “Ripe Peach” pp. 468–470
3. “October” pp. 493–501
   “Crater Lake” p. 513
   “A Myth of Devotion” pp. 540–541
   “Crossroads” p. 618
   “Abundance” p. 620

Suggested edition: Louise Glück. Poems 1962–2012. Farrar, Straus, Giroux. NYC. ISBN: 978-0-374-53409-7 (pbk).

Tutor: Janice Macaulay
Date: April 10 & 11
Cost: $180

In an alternative history, Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR in 1940 and signs a pact with Hitler. The Plot Against America describes one Jewish family’s struggle against the rising anti-Semitism. In Nemesis, Roth imagines a terrifying polio epidemic in his Newark neighborhood during the summer of 1944.

Reading Assignments:

1. “June 1940–October 1940, Vote for Lindbergh or Vote for War”
   “November 1940–June 1941, Loudmouth Jew”
   “June 1941–December 1941, Following Christians”
   “January 1942–February 1942, The Stump”
   “March 1942–June 1942, Never Before”
2. “May 1942–June 1942, Their Country”
   “June 1942–October 1942, The Winchell Riots”
   “October 1942, Bad Days”
   “October 1942, Perpetual Fear”
3. Nemesis

Suggested editions: Philip Roth, The Plot Against America (New York: Vintage Books, 2005). ISBN: 1-4000-7949-7.
Philip Roth, Nemesis (New York: Vintage Books, 2010). ISBN: 978-0-307-47500-8.

Tutor: David Townsend
Date: April 10 & 11
Cost: $180
This session is FULL

This overwhelming, beautiful novel fearlessly addresses questions of love and death, time and aging, intellect and affection, sympathy and isolation, artistic vocation and family relations. Gorgeous prose, striking images, and beautifully painted scenes balance a deep and original presentation of interior monologue. Mrs. Ramsey will accompany you for the rest of your life.

Reading Assignments:

1. The Window, pp. 3–124
2. Time Passes, pp. 125–144
3. The Lighthouse, pp. 145–209

Suggested edition: Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse. Harcourt/Harvest pg. ISBN: 0-15-690739-9 (pbk).

Tutor: Rebecca Goldner
Date: April 24 & 25
Cost: $180

Brazilian author Clarice Lispector writes with sensitivity and beauty about the ordinary and the extraordinary moments in daily life. In this selection of short stories, we will read about chickens and eggs, but also about the different stages of women’s domestic lives, all while thinking about what love means to us.

Reading Assignments:

1. “A Chicken” and “A Tale of So Much Love”
2. “Interrupted Story” and “Love”
3. “Family Ties”

Suggested edition: Clarice Lispector, Complete Stories. ISBN: 978-08112279933.

Tutor: David Townsend
Date: April 24 & 25
Cost: $180
This session is FULL

Louise Glück, born in New York City in 1943, is one of the best contemporary poets, appropriately honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020. She brings classical themes to life with technical precision, sensitivity, and insight. Her themes range from love, sensuality, and family relationships, to divorce, aging, sorrow and death. The Nobel Prize Committee underscored “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”

Reading Assignments:

1. “Gretel in Darkness” p. 61
   “The Triumph of Achilles” p. 159
   “Confession” p. 209
   “Terminal Resemblance” pp. 234–235
   “Celestial Music” pp. 240–241
   “Matins”--“Forgive me if I say I love you....” p. 255
   “The Doorway” p. 275
   “Presque Isle” p. 291
2. “Parable of the King” p. 312
   “Departure” p. 314
   ​​​​“Ithaca” p. 315
   “Circe’s Power” p. 338
   “Nostos” p.342
   “Telemachus’ Confession” p. 347
   “The Muse of Happiness” pp. 466–467
   “Ripe Peach” pp. 468–470
3. “October” pp. 493–501
   “Crater Lake” p. 513
   “A Myth of Devotion” pp. 540–541
   “Crossroads” p. 618
   “Abundance” p. 620

Suggested edition: Louise Glück. Poems 1962–2012. Farrar, Straus, Giroux. NYC. ISBN: 978-0-374-53409-7 (pbk).

Tutor: Louis Petrich
Date: May 1 & 2
Cost: $180
This session is FULL

Participants will discuss Shakespeare’s problematic dark comedy about sexual license, corruption, purity and fidelity, and his favorite subject; theatrical political authority. The harassed turn the tables on the harasser. But what if the deed does not measure the intent?

Reading Assignments:

1. Acts I and II
2. Acts III and IV
3. Act V and the whole

Suggested edition: Any edition with lines is acceptable.

Tutor: Rebecca Goldner
Date: May 1 & 2
Cost: $180.00
This session is FULL

Mrs. Dalloway takes place over a single day and follows various characters as they make their way through that day, culminating in a summer party given by evening. The introspection of each character reveals a deep inner life that touches up externally in only the most superficial of ways. The language is stunning; perhaps this novella is even poetry, and we will at times treat it as such.

Reading Assignments:

1. Pages 3–56
2. Pages 56–102
3. Pages 102–end

Suggested edition: Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, Vintage Classics. ISBN-13: 978-1-78487-086-7

Tutor: Erica Beall
Date: May 1 & 2
Cost: $180

In these essays, Arendt takes on political philosophy’s most pressing questions and fundamental concepts. A student of Martin Heidegger and an accomplished scholar of ancient political philosophy, Arendt offers a profoundly compelling analysis of the origins and meaning of the political crises facing the modern world.

Reading Assignments:

1. “What is Authority?”
2. “What is Freedom?”
3. “Truth and Politics”

Suggested edition: Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future. Penguin Classics. ISBN-13: 978-0143104810.