Seminar Catalog by Location, Summer Classics 2026 Schedule

Seek out your life well-lived at Summer Classics and join others in pursuit of insight, connection, and a flourishing community.

The Summer Classics course catalog is inspired by the 2026 theme The Pursuit of Happiness and is grounded by the St. John’s College Program. Consider which author or book you’d like to have as a companion for a weeklong session this summer from the 35 seminars available.

In-Person Seminars

All in-person seminars will be held at the Santa Fe, New Mexico campus of St. John’s College.

Week 1: July 6–10

Hannah Arendt on the American Experiment

Rebecca Goldner and Rob Mass
10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 6–10, 2026
IN-PERSON

Hannah Arendt might be thought of as a 20th century Tocqueville in her detailed descriptions and assessments of American social and political conditions, both historical and contemporary. With the sensibility of a recent immigrant, Arendt offers philosophically grounded insights on American traditions and institutions. We begin with two of her essays on the American founding. “The Pursuit of Happiness” discusses the true meaning of that phrase in the Declaration of Independence. In “The Revolutionary Tradition and its Lost Treasure,” Arendt identifies the unfulfilled promise of the American founding. Then, we turn to her critique of two aspects of contemporary American social life—“The Crisis in Education” and “The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Political Significance.” We finish with her highly controversial essay on race, “Reflections on Little Rock,” as well as her later reconsideration of that position. Together, these writings illuminate hidden aspects of our traditions and point the way to American renewal as we approach the 250th anniversary of our revolution.

Texts:

Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future. Penguin, ISBN 978-0143104810
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution. Penguin, ISBN 978-0143039907
A manual is provided.

Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote

Musa al-Gharbi and J. Walter Sterling
10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 6–10, 2026
IN-PERSON

Miguel de Cervantes’s delightful masterpiece is arguably the “first modern novel” and unquestionably one of the very greatest novels. Quixote (published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615) is maximally ambitious, one of those books about everything: love, politics, faith, sacrifice, heroism, suffering, laughter, writing, reading—and the power of the imagination. We read the entire work over five seminars, tracing the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza as they encounter the humor, hardship, and wonder of the world—the “entire tragedy and comedy of life,” to borrow a Platonic phrase.

Text: Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (tr. Edith Grossman). HarperCollins, ISBN 978-0060934347

Flappers, Philosophers, and Self-made Men: The Great Gatsby and Beyond

Seth Appelbaum and Michael Grenke
10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 6–10, 2026
IN-PERSON

Although F. Scott Fitzgerald writes with disarming levity, he is a master craftsman and a serious observer of American social mores. Fitzgerald’s witty detachment leads many to underestimate him as “light,” but that lightness is partly a disguise, and partly a kind of wisdom, that allows him to see surfaces for what they are. In this seminar, we read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby alongside several of his short stories, including “A Short Trip Home,” “The Ice Palace,” and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” These charming stories are less familiar, but very much worth reading because of their ingenious, thought-provoking conceits and careful construction. Gatsby, of course, needs no introduction, and is almost universally, not to say exclusively, read in high schools. We’d like to rescue the book from its overexposure and read it in a setting where it can be studied with more care, both as a well-constructed novel and as an investigation into the question: Can a man make himself?

Texts:

Gustav Carl Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Topi Heikkerö and Scott Phelps
10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 6–10, 2026
IN-PERSON

The Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933) is an introduction to Jung’s central discoveries. In this work, from his independent and fully developed period, Jung considers problems of modernity, dream analysis, psychological integration, stages of life, his theory in contrast to Freud, character types, depth psychological reading of literature, psychotherapy, religion, and spirituality. The core of Jung’s analytical psychology is the understanding of individuation, the process in which a person, usually in midlife, is confronted by the unconscious to integrate previously disowned parts of the psyche. This book traces an arc from an originally medical inquiry that turns into a transformative process—even for the analyst himself.

Text: C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (tr. C. F. Baynes and W. S. Dell). Harcourt, ISBN 978-0156612067

Origins of the United States Constitution

Grant Franks and Eric Salem
10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 6–10, 2026
IN-PERSON

It is impossible to overstate the importance of the U. S. Constitution. The president and all public servants swear to support, uphold, and defend it. Judges look to it as the source of our laws. Historians respect it as the longest surviving charter of a democratic republic. Now, when the tweets, bleats, and screeches that fill our political discourse claim that our Constitution is under assault, we do well to revisit it. We read the text of the Constitution and examine its origins in the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation. We also consider questions raised in the Federalist and Antifederalist debate over ratification concerning allocation of governmental powers and whether explicit declarations of individual rights limiting state power are necessary protections of the individual or pernicious attempts to meddle with the ability of future generations to govern themselves.

Texts:

The Federalist Papers (ed. George W. Carey and James McClellan). Liberty Fund, ISBN 978-0865972896
The Anti-Federalist Papers. Dover, ISBN 978-0486843452

The Science Institute | Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem

Joshua Mirth and Peter Pesic
10 a.m.–Noon MDT and 2–4 p.m. MDT
July 6–10, 2026
IN-PERSON

Though many mathematicians had always assumed that every correct proposition about arithmetic was provable, Kurt Gödel proved otherwise, causing much consternation and puzzlement. What could it mean for a proposition to be true but not provable? How would it ever be possible to prove unprovability and how could that be accomplished? We go carefully through Gödel’s 1931 paper with the help of detailed notes that outline needed basics of symbolic logic, assuming only a general familiarity with mathematical arguments. John von Neumann thought that, after Gödel, “logic would never be the same again.” Yet how did that happen and what exactly changed?

Text: A manual is provided.

W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk

Michael Dink and Rebecca Goldner
2–4 p.m. MDT
July 6–10, 2026
IN-PERSON

In the Forethought to The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois declares that the problem of the dawning twentieth century is “the problem of the color-line” and suggests that he intends to take his readers “behind the Veil.” What does Du Bois mean by this problem and what is this veil? Following the failures of Reconstruction to prepare the South for the economic and educational future, Du Bois makes a compelling claim for liberal education as the path forward not only for Black communities, but for America as a whole. Intertwining heartbreaking personal stories with acute observation and analysis, Du Bois offers a description of a country struggling to find its way forward and to redefine itself, to recognize what it now is and what it should be.

Text: W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk. Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0300195828

Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate

James Carey and Frank Pagano
2–4 p.m. MDT
July 6–10, 2026
IN-PERSON

Life and Fate is a Russian novel written in the 1950s by Vasily Grossman, who served as a journalist during the Second World War. Grossman was an eyewitness to major battles fought on the Eastern Front and to the liberation of concentration camps as the war was ending. Life and Fate is centered around these events, including especially the epic Battle of Stalingrad. But it is also about ordinary human beings caught up in a struggle between two totalitarian regimes clutching each other by the throat while simultaneously terrorizing their own citizens. Life and Fate has been compared to Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It has also been called the greatest novel written after the Second World War.

Text: Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate (tr. Robert Chandler). NYRB Classics, ISBN 978-1590172018

Film at Summer Classics | Selected Films of Andrei Tarkovsky

David Carl and Rebekah Spearman
2–4 p.m. MDT
July 6–10, 2026
IN-PERSON

Although he made only seven films over the course of his career, Andrei Tarkovsky is widely hailed as the greatest Russian filmmaker and one of the greatest voices in world cinema of all time, ranked alongside artists like Bergman, Kurosawa, and Godard. We study his classic 1966 film about the great Russian icon painter Andrei Rublev, then consider his last two films, made in 1983 and 1986, in Italy and Sweden, while he was in exile from Russia during the final years of his life. In each of these works, Tarkovsky explores the themes of profound spiritual longing in the context of human suffering against a backdrop of stunning cinematic landscapes.

Films:

Andrei Tarkovsky, Andrei Rublev
Andrei Tarkovsky, Nostalghia
Andrei Tarkovsky, The Sacrifice

Week 2: July 13–17

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics

Grant Franks and Eric Salem
10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 13–17, 2026
IN-PERSON

What is the human good, the end at which all our choices and actions aim? Aristotle sets out to answer this question in Nicomachean Ethics. Finding a name for the good is relatively easy—“happiness” (eudaimonia) is the underlying aim of all our pursuits—and by the midpoint of book one, Aristotle has also arrived at a rough sketch of a definition: Happiness, or the good, is an “activity in accordance with virtue.” But filling in this sketch, arriving at an ample or even adequate account of the human good, proves to be much harder. To accomplish this task, Aristotle must range in thought over the whole human condition; he must explore choice and responsibility; the moral and intellectual virtues; moral weakness in all its variety; and the meaning and forms of pleasure and friendship. In the end, answering his opening question requires Aristotle to weigh the relative value of a life of noble action against the life of the mind.

Text: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (tr. Joe Sachs). Focus, ISBN 978-1585100354

Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life

Steve Isenberg and Mike Peters
10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 13–17, 2026
IN-PERSON

To mark our nation’s 250th anniversary, we read Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life, a sterling biography of our first commanding general and president. We will reflect on Washington’s colonial experience, his struggles to sustain the army and to ensure victory in the Revolutionary War, and his challenges in founding a united country and defining the presidency. We also consider why, amid many figures of stature like Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, and Madison—who themselves became later presidents and Cabinet officers—Washington was bound to be our first president. We further note that the frictions and failures of Washington’s era remain our inheritance: slavery, factionalism, states’ rights, the ambit of presidential authority, sectional rivalry, and constitutional interpretation.

Text: Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life. Penguin, ISBN 978-0143119968

Thoreau and the Republic in Crisis: Conscience, Law, and Persuasion

David Satran and J. Walter Sterling
10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 13–17, 2026
IN-PERSON

This seminar explores Henry David Thoreau’s political essays as a searching critique of the moral foundations of the American republic. Writing in the face of slavery, public complacency, and the failures of political institutions, Thoreau asks whether a democratic people can remain just when their laws and leaders commit injustice. We read his reflections on conscience, civic duty, and violence alongside Abraham Lincoln’s arguments for lawful reform and Alexis de Tocqueville’s analysis of majority power, individualism, and democratic character. Taken together, these works illuminate a central tension in American political life: how free individuals should engage with their government in moments of moral crisis.

Texts:

Henry David Thoreau, Walden and other Writings. Modern Library, ISBN 978-0679783343
Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln Speeches. Penguin, ISBN 9780143121985
A manual is provided.

Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Kenneth Wolfe and Alan Zeitlin
10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 13–17, 2026
IN-PERSON

In this funny but deeply serious tale set in the antebellum South, Huck flees from "civilization" as well as the beatings of his alcoholic father. On Jackson’s Island he meets the runaway slave Jim. Together they seek freedom and find friendship as they float down the Mississippi on a raft. We should be prepared to be prosecuted, banished, or shot, since in our discussions we may find ourselves looking for a motive, a moral, or a plot.

Text: Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Penguin Classics, ISBN 978-0143107323

The Duel in Literature

Tony Eagan and Richard McCombs
10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 13–17, 2026
IN-PERSON

The duel is a beloved device in modern literature. Shakespeare, Dickens, Rousseau, Tolstoy, Victor Hugo, Thomas Mann, and Arthur Conan Doyle all wrote about dueling—whether as tragedy, comedy, or farce. But how does a duel come about, and what makes it so compelling? Are duelists generally eager or reluctant to face death? Does the duel serve a social function? Can a duel generate love between combatants? We examine these questions by reading five of the best dueling tales—short works by Chekhov, Conrad, Dostoevsky, Kleist, and Pushkin, investigating themes of pride, envy, courage, eroticism, friendship, offense, ritual, boredom, and death. And we discuss the enduring motif of idyllic nature as the perfect setting for intimate violence.

Texts:

The Science Institute | Time: From Plato to Gödel

Peter Pesic and Kit Slover
10 a.m.–Noon MDT and 2–4 p.m. MDT
July 13–17, 2026
IN-PERSON

An omnipresent yet elusive aspects of human experience, we have no specific sense that detects time as sight does space, yet we seem to be caught in time’s inexorable passage. Is time a necessary aspect of the world or is it contingent, dependent on perception, even illusory? We explore changing views of time through careful study of critical passages from Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine through Newton, Kant, Leibniz, Einstein, Minkowski, McTaggart, and Gödel. The essential issues are physical and psychological more than technical and mathematical. We seek to understand better what Gödel called “that mysterious and seemingly self-contradictory being which, on the other hand, seems to form the basis of the world’s and our own existence.”

Text: A manual is provided.

Two Novels by Edith Wharton

David Bolotin and Christine Chen
2–4 p.m. MDT
July 13–17, 2026
IN-PERSON

Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence is widely recognized as a classic American novel. It paints a memorable picture of the upper-class society of Wharton’s youth and tells the story of a man who, falling in love with an outsider, tries but ultimately fails to escape from its constraints. To help prepare for our reading of this novel, we first read one of Wharton’s shorter works, Summer, which is set, not in New York high society, but in a New England village. As in The Age of Innocence, the central character falls in love, hopes to escape from the limited world in which he—or in this case, she—lives, and yet is ultimately drawn back into it. Together, we seek to understand the power of social convention and its relationship to erotic longing in the lives of Wharton’s characters.

Texts:

Religion, Philosophy, and Politics: An Introduction to Medieval Islamic Thought

James Carey and John Cornell
2–4 p.m. MDT
July 13–17, 2026
IN-PERSON

Whence came modernity? How did Western secular society come about, esteeming scientific ways of thinking over faith in revelation? With only slight exaggeration, one might say that modernity began as an Islamic idea. The Islamic philosophers of the ninth through twelfth centuries not only translated the works of the ancient Greek sages but also elaborated their own original political visions. Transmitted to Europe in the Middle Ages, Islamic texts would revolutionize the Western mind, beginning with the radical Aristotelians and leading to modern founders like Spinoza. What innovations broke the mold of religion-based cultures? This seminar reads exemplary texts from the Golden Age of Islamic Civilization by Al-Fārābī, Avicenna, Ibn Tufayl, and Averroes.

Text: Medieval Political Philosophy (ed. Joshua Parens and Joseph C. Macfarland). Cornell University Press, ISBN 978-0801476815

Film at Summer Classics | From Noir to Neo-Noir: Four Great Films from the Noir Tradition

David Carl and Paul Goldberg
2–4 p.m. MDT
July 13–17, 2026
IN-PERSON

Along with the Western, Film Noir may be the single most influential movie genre in the history of cinema. Although distinctly American in its sensibilities, unlike the classic “cowboy movie,” Film Noir has had an international influence on directors as diverse as Fritz Lang, Jean Luc Godard, and Akira Kurosawa. We will look at four great examples from the noir tradition, from two early classics from the 1940s and ‘50s to two examples of how Film Noir evolved in the 1970s to renew the genre’s ability to tell a nation about itself through the power of cinematic storytelling. These are movies about America’s growing pains, from the glory days of Hollywood to the gritty streets of 1970s Los Angeles as seen through the eyes of some of our most perceptive filmmakers. Movies about power, love, betrayal, and ambition—all the things that made Hollywood, and America, a force that shaped the 20th century around the globe.

Films:

Carol Reed, The Third Man
Billy Wilder, Sunset Boulevard
Robert Altman, The Long Goodbye
Roman Polanski, Chinatown

Week 3: July 20–24

Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow

David Carl and Tony Eagan
10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 20–24, 2026
IN-PERSON

Often described as one of the greatest American novels of the second half of the 20th century and a landmark of “postmodern” fiction (whatever that is), Pynchon’s novel has been compared to works like Moby Dick and Ulysses. Through the lens of an American on the run in Europe at the end of World War II, Pynchon conducts one of the most searing investigations of the abuses of power, global politics, science, technology, and industry ever rendered in literature. Combining styles drawn from traditions ranging from high modernism to absurdist farce, sexual aberrations, pop culture, Pavlovian psychology, engineering, music, and Hollywood, Pynchon constructs an elaborate, infuriating, heart-rending portrait of America’s uneasy move from isolationism to world superpower built up from the debris of the Second World War. WARNING: This novel is not for the faint of heart, the easily offended, or the intellectually timorous. It is bawdy, experimental, irreverent, outrageous, and revelatory.

Text: Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow. Penguin, ISBN 978-0143039945

Opera at Summer Classics | Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin

David Bolotin and Christine Chen
10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 20–24, 2026
IN-PERSON
Specialty Course

In 1877, Tchaikovsky began work on his opera Eugene Onegin. It is thought that he was inspired by the parallel between his own epistolary relationship with the woman he would soon marry, albeit briefly and disastrously, and that depicted in Pushkin’s eponymous, beloved novel-in-verse. Famously described as “an encyclopedia of Russian life,” the novel richly depicts the lives of peasants and aristocrats in early 19th century Russia. The opera comprises a group of distinct character portraits set amidst vignettes of country and city life, and its many dances serve as important cultural and social signifiers and dramatic plot points. We listen closely to the opera and follow the libretto, as well as attend a performance. Reading Pushkin’s novel is encouraged but not required.

Texts:

The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology

Seth Appelbaum and Claudia Hauer
10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 20–24, 2026
IN-PERSON

Hans Jonas’s essays on philosophical biology open up an inquiry into the implications of how various organisms harness their vital energy. The essays are meditations on life, death, and the meaning imparted by our biology. Jonas opens up a study of the philosophical implications of the metabolism, through which we organize and sustain our lives. These essays provoke new thinking about a philosophy of life, by reflecting on the biological foundation of our senses and the way we encounter the world. In this seminar, we read five of Jonas’s essays, laying the groundwork of his thought and ending with his reflections on the unique freedom of human beings.

Text: Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. Northwestern University Press, ISBN 978-0810117495

Seeing, Walking, and Knowing

April Olsen and Krishnan Venkatesh
10 a.m.–Noon MDT: Monday, Thursday, Friday morning activity
2–4 p.m. MDT: Monday, Thursday afternoons seminar
10 a.m.–4 p.m. MDT: Tuesday, Wednesday, full day excursion
July 20–24, 2026
IN-PERSON
Premium Course

“The question is not what you look at, but what you see,” wrote Thoreau in his Journal. But can we understand what seeing is if we merely sit inside a classroom or if all we see are words? We must go outside. Spend a week with Thoreau, Dillard, Aristotle, and R.L. Stevenson on full-day excursions in beautiful Santa Fe, guided by faculty through both discussion and practica, in the grand laboratory of nature. Read essays on walking as a way of being and on careful seeing as a path to knowledge and better living. Enjoy the practical activities of looking—from meadows to microscopes—of sketching, writing, and easy-to-moderate hiking. Participants will receive keepsake composition and drawing supplies for their observations and presentations.

Texts:

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Harper, ISBN 978-0061233326
Henry David Thoreau, Walking. Dover, ISBN 978-0486836485
A manual is provided.

John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty

Grant Franks and Martha Franks
2–4 p.m. MDT
July 20–24, 2026
IN-PERSON

What is “the pursuit of happiness” if not the ability of everyone to seek what he or she wishes? While other political philosophies dictate in one way or another how individuals should live, the classical liberalism of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty leaves the design of life as much as possible to the unrestricted choice of each person. Mill’s ideas run deep in American society, but they run alongside other notions including, for instance, the puritanism of the New England pilgrims, the uptight Stoicism of Cicero in a schoolboy’s Latin lessons, and the slave societies of the antebellum South. It is important to read and reflect carefully on Mill’s liberalism to understand its place in our own thought.

Text: John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and the Subjection of Women. Penguin, ISBN 978-0141441474

Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina

Paul Goldberg and W. Clark Wolf
2–4 p.m. MDT
July 20–24, 2026
IN-PERSON

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” So begins Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece, Anna Karenina. In the novel, the eponymous Anna finds herself in a position that many would consider enviable: married to a senior government official, with a young son and an apparently stable and comfortable life. Yet, she is unsatisfied. After her affair with the young Count Vronsky, Anna and her family must deal with the fallout. The novel also follows the parallel story of Levin, a young landowner, in his romantic pursuit of Kitty, a beautiful young woman who is also courted by Count Vronsky. Anna Karenina probes issues of love, happiness, and how our pursuits thereof lead us into and out of conflict, both with our families and our broader social circles.

Text: Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky). Penguin, ISBN 978-0143035008

Spirited Truths: Wine Across Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Storytelling

Leslie Kay and Paola Villa
2–4 p.m. MDT
July 20–24, 2026
IN-PERSON
Specialty Course

This seminar explores how wine shapes human experience through the combined perspectives of neuroscience, philosophy, and literature. Drawing on Gordon Shepherd’s Neuroenology: How the Brain Creates the Taste of Wine, Plato’s Symposium, and Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard, we trace how taste can bridge the disparate realms of knowledge, ritual, identity, and storytelling. The course invites participants to develop critical, scientific, and imaginative perspectives on why wine holds such a central role in human culture, becoming a catalyst for dialogue, desire, and the pursuit of truth.

The enduring notion that one can find “truth in wine” becomes a point of inquiry: does wine expose genuine truths or only conjure pleasurable illusions? And further, are pleasure and truth not such odd bedfellows? Together with these texts and a series of guided experiments centered around wine, we invite participants to think with and through taste—to interpret aromas, words, and ideas while testing (or tasting?) the boundaries between the subjective and the objective, science and myth, perception and philosophical insight.

Texts:

Film at Summer Classics | Indigenous Cinema

David Carl and David Meyer
2–4 p.m. MDT
July 20–24, 2026
IN-PERSON

Estimates suggest that Native Americans have occupied the North American continent for 30,000 years. The oldest work of written literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, is only about 4,000 years old. By comparison, human beings have been using the cinematic arts to tell their stories for a mere 125 years, and it was only in 1998, with the appearance of Chris Eyre’s movie Smoke Signals (based on a collection of stories by Sherman Alexie), that an authentic indigenous cinema appeared. We study seminal works from this relatively new tradition of Native American and indigenous filmmaking—a tradition which strives to recapture the image of “the Indian” from traditional Western movies—by focusing on four films made between 1998 and 2016: Chris Eyre’s Smoke Signals, and his 2002 follow-up film Skins; Amanda Kernell’s Oscar-nominated Sami Blood, from 2016, about an Indigenous Sami woman passing for white in Sweden; and Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, from 2000, which is the sole cinematic depiction of a traditional Indigenous Inuit myth, made by the community whence it sprung and to whom it remains a central part of their culture.

Films:

Chris Eyre, Smoke Signals
Chris Eyre, Skins
Amanda Kernell, Sami Blood
Zacharias Kunuk, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner

Online Seminars

All online seminars will use the Zoom platform.

Week 4: July 27–31

Pursuing Happiness—and Philosophy—in Marriage and Film: On Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage

Brendan Boyle and Nathan Shields
Noon–2 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 27–31, 2026
ONLINE

Stanley Cavell was perhaps the foremost American philosopher of the second half of the 20th century. In a series of studies on Emerson, Thoreau, and others, Cavell took to pursuing philosophy in a distinctively “American” mode, a note signaled in the title of this study of American comedic films made between 1934 and 1949. The book comprises extended “readings” of seven films: The Lady Eve, It Happened One Night, Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, Adam’s Rib, and The Awful Truth. All are American classics, and all are concerned with the way marriage both makes possible and impedes the promise of happiness. In so doing, Cavell sets these films, as he did for Emerson and Thoreau, in philosophical conversation with central figures and questions of the European tradition—Kant, Wittgenstein, and the problem of skepticism. The book, then, is an attempt to think through the significance of film for this distinctively American mode of pursuing philosophy and an examination of the place of one institution—marriage—in achieving the Declaration’s promise of happiness.

Text: Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Harvard University Press, ISBN 978-0674739062

Films:

Preston Sturges, The Lady Eve
Frank Capra, It Happened One Night
Howard Hawks, Bringing up Baby
George Cukor, The Philadelphia Story
Howard Hawks, His Girl Friday
George Cukor, Adam's Rib
Leo McCarey, The Awful Truth

Hawthorne: Before and After The Letter

Charlie Barrett and Christopher Cohoon
Noon–2 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 27–31, 2026
ONLINE

“Hawthorne appalls—entices.”
-Emily Dickinson

Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) presents a founding myth of American identity coupled with one of the most evocative portraits of a female character in the American literary canon. At the center of the novel is a symbol that is never defined but constantly reinterpreted, as the characters confront both their wilderness within and the wilderness encroaching upon their frontier settlement. We explore questions about sin, lust, betrayal, forgiveness, and redemption, and consider how these issues might play a necessary role in a nation’s origin story. We begin with two of Hawthorne’s best short stories, “Young Goodman Brown” (1835) and “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844). The first tells a tale of a nocturnal forest encounter with what Melville called, in an exuberant review, “the blackness of the darkness beyond.” The second concerns a young woman who becomes poisonous as she tends her father’s poisonous garden. Both stories help prepare us to re-evaluate the depth and strangeness of Hawthorne’s great American novel.

Texts:

Homer’s The Odyssey

Nicholas Bellinson and Khafiz Kerimov
Noon–2 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 27–31, 2026
ONLINE

“Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
the wanderer, harried for years on end,
after he plundered the stronghold
on the proud height of Troy.”

So begins the great epic of Odysseus’s delayed homecoming, of his many adventures on his way home to Ithaca where Penelope and Telemachus await him. Sirens, nymphs, monsters on sea and land, and of course human beings of all stripes populate the twenty-four books of this poem. We suggest the Wilson and Fitzgerald translations (pick whichever suits you).

Text:

Henry James’s The Bostonians

Eric Salem and Marsaura Shukla
Noon–2 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 27–31, 2026
ONLINE

In The Bostonians, Henry James depicts the passions and tensions animating Reconstruction-era America. Basil Ransom, a conservative Southern abolitionist, enters the Boston milieu of his cousin, Olive Chancellor, a world in which radical social reform, both feminist and abolitionist, mixes with spiritualism and mesmerism. The triangle of influence connecting Basil, Olive, and Verena Tarrant, the promising young daughter of a local mesmerist, reveals a constellation of conflicting ideas about freedom, power, spiritual life, and happiness that continue to be relevant in our day.

Text: Henry James, The Bostonians. Penguin, ISBN 978-0140437669

Five Essential American Texts: Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln

David Carl and David Townsend
Noon–2 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 27–31, 2026
ONLINE

The United States of America is a nation or meta-nation resting upon a foundation of ideas. The five documents selected for our five days of seminar are brief, focused, and electric in their power to spark the fire of liberty, equality, and justice upon which we Americans stand. The first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence, basically written by Thomas Jefferson, may be history’s greatest political text. They make America rival Sparta as a people carrying their beliefs and code of ideas primarily in their hearts. Washington’s “Farewell Address” and Lincoln’s two inaugurals frame the power, duty, and vision of American leadership. Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” is America’s poem of true patriotism.

Text: A manual is provided.

Lessons from Tolstoy: Five Stories on the Theme of Happiness

John Cornell and Natalie Elliot
3–5 p.m. EDT / 1–3 p.m. MDT
July 27–31, 2026
ONLINE

“All happy families are alike,” Leo Tolstoy pronounced at the outset of Anna Karenina. “Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Unfortunately, this statement does not tell us very much about what happiness itself consists of. But it was hardly the great Russian writer’s last word on the subject. He never stopped meditating on the question of human fulfillment as he continually interrogated the illusions of romantic love, bourgeois wealth, and social status. This seminar explores some of Tolstoy’s more challenging inquiries into happiness through five famous novellas and short stories: “Family Happiness,” “What Men Live By,” “The Death of Iván Ilych,” “How Much Land Does a Man Need?,” and “The Kreutzer Sonata.”

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Walt Whitman’s America: Leaves of Grass (1855)

Scheherazade Khan and David Townsend
3–5 p.m. EDT / 1–3 p.m. MDT
July 27–31, 2026
ONLINE

Whitman’s 1855 Preface appears exclusively in his first version of Leaves of Grass, self-printed and published anonymously. Identifying himself as "one of the roughs", Whitman asserts, “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nation. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.” These bold claims by an obscure 35- year-old printer, were noted by Emerson, perhaps the most famous American thinker at that time, who wrote to the poet, “I salute you at the beginning of a great career.” Like the great conversation and classical education at St. John’s, Leaves of Grass transcends departmental boundaries of poetry, politics, philosophy, psychology, theology, and more.

Celebrate with us as we read this 145-page seminal American and universal work in its entirety.

Text: Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: The Original 1855 Edition. Penguin Classics, ISBN 978-0140421996

Herbert Read’s The Green Child

David Carl and Ron Martin Wilson
6–8 p.m. EDT / 4–6 p.m. MDT
July 27–31, 2026
ONLINE

Though not widely known and surely underread, Herbert Read’s 1935 novel, The Green Child, is described by no less than T. S. Eliot as “one of the finest examples of prose of the twentieth century.” Penned by a self-described “anarchist” and “Englishman…proud to follow in the tradition of Milton and Shelley,” Read’s novel is also a strange European entry into the canon of “dictator novels,” a largely Latin American genre exploring the psychic geography of men who are bent upon controlling the world around them. The class discusses the story of Read’s Dr. Olivero, whose rise to the top of an unnamed South American country is followed by his leadership’s eventual stagnation, leading him to stage his own “assassination.” What happens after Dr. Olivero returns to his native England cannot be easily described, but when he sees a nearby stream flowing uphill, the story zigs and zags between timely political saga and surrealizing fantasy, asking its readers to assess the meaning of life after a kind of political death.

Text: Herbert Read, The Green Child. New Directions, ISBN 978-0811221825

Shakespeare’s Roman Plays: Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra

Louis Petrich and Emma Styles-Swaim
7–9 p.m. EDT / 5–7 p.m. MDT
July 27–31, 2026
ONLINE

America’s founders studied Roman history, especially the end of the republic and establishment of empire. They wanted to learn how republics fail. Could that be prevented in America? Shakespeare, too, studied the Romans, in four tragedies and one tragicomedy. Two tragedies that belong together deserve now as fresh attention as ever. Julius Caesar contains Shakespeare’s deepest study of political rhetoric and conspiracy. Self-deception and vanity abound. Love of freedom bloodies the capitol, civil war ensues, and Caesarism wins, though friendship still moves envious and righteous men. In Antony and Cleopatra, passionate love in the middle years of life summons poetry of the highest order from world rulers who lose the world. They make love sound superior to overlordship of the world. What lessons do we learn from them?

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