Whether you choose to attend in person or online, Summer Classics offers a rare—and rarified—opportunity to connect with fellow lifelong learners, sharing ideas and examining what it means to be a human in the world.
Choose from a roster of 37 captivating classes, 27 meeting in person and 10 entirely online.
All in-person seminars will be held at the Santa Fe, New Mexico, campus of St. John’s College.
Steve Isenberg and Mike Peters 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 11–15, 2022 IN-PERSON
Milton’s Paradise Lost is among the greatest poems. Its epic scope, lyrical craft, and imaginative power are equal to its mighty aim to “assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men.” It is at once a story—the original story—and the original argument, yet approached anew. Milton’s characters, divine and human, as well as their actions and fates, are rendered with a profound and sympathetic complexity. The poem achieves its stature in its struggle and assurance in grappling with the most complex questions of belief. The genius of Milton’s poetic architecture shapes the grand ideas and debates regarding the beginnings of humanity and its endurance.
Text: John Milton, Paradise Lost. Penguin Classics, ISBN: 9780140424393
Ron Haflidson and Krishnan Venkatesh 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 11–15, 2022 IN-PERSON
The purpose of this seminar is to explore laughter: what it is, how it works, and why it matters. We begin with Ben Jonson’s most performed play, the comedy Volpone, the story of the title character who pretends he is dying in order to trick others into performing lavish acts so he will make them his heir. We next consider William Shakespeare’s comedic masterpiece Twelfth Night, the story of a young noblewoman Viola, who after a shipwreck separates from her twin brother and disguises herself as a man so she can become the servant of a duke. We conclude with Nobel Prize-winning French philosopher Henri Bergson’s short work Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic.
Texts:
Sarah Stickney and Susan Stickney 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 11–15, 2022 IN-PERSON
The only person ever to win the Nobel Prize in literature for the short story, Munro is a writer of impeccable craft and subtle wildness. The deceptively simple surface of her stories—the life of small towns, social obligation, friendship, coupledom—conceals a riveting landscape that teems with secrets, disquiet, and hidden life. Munro is permanently interested in the possibilities and limits of communication between human beings. Can we reveal ourselves to each other in words or otherwise? What is the cost when we choose to hide or suppress ourselves? These stories are a delight to read and a puzzle to think about. They provide a master class both in human relations and in the art of the short story.
Text: Alice Munro, Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014. Vintage, ISBN: 9781101872352
Eric Salem and Marsaura Shukla 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 11–15, 2022 IN-PERSON
T. S. Eliot regarded Four Quartets as his masterpiece. It is certainly the great work of his maturity. Organized in part around the four elements, the four poems that form the quartet—“Burnt Norton” (air), “East Coker” (earth), “The Dry Salvages” (water), and “Little Gidding” (fire)—weave together Eliot’s late reflections on time and eternity, salvation and redemption, flowers and human flourishing. Time is the central notion here; it haunts almost every line of the quartets, even when the poems seem to turn to other topics: music and dance, sailing and the sea, history and the possibility of human happiness.
Text: T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets. Mariner Books, ISBN: 9780156332255
Seth Appelbaum and William Braithwaite 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 11–15, 2022 IN-PERSON
Though for believers it is primarily a sacred book, the Bible is also open to other respectful readings. We try to read its opening chapters with a fresh and independent eye, in a spirit of inquiry, setting aside theology and the centuries’ accumulated interpretations. Why are there two accounts of the origin of man and woman (Chapters 1–2)? What knowledge are Adam and Eve ashamed of after eating of the forbidden tree (Chapter 3)? What does the Cain and Abel story suggest about the murderous passions that can fester within families (Chapters 4–5)? Why was Noah chosen to survive the flood (Chapters 6-10)? What does the Tower of Babel story suggest about why different peoples hate one another (Chapter 11)?
Text: Any King James translation
Martha Franks and April Olsen 2–4 p.m. MDT July 11–15, 2022 IN-PERSON
The Bhagavadgita, or “Song of the Lord,” is a dialogue between Arjuna, the great warrior, and Krishna, his divine charioteer, just before the greatest battle on earth begins. The moral and metaphysical topics covered by the Gita are always relevant, but its teaching can be quite mysterious. In fact, two Indian political leaders used the Gita to support opposite positions about how best to achieve self-rule during the time of the British Raj: Gandhi claimed that the ancient text supported his non-violent strategy, while Tilak claimed that it justified using violence when necessary. As we see, even such dualisms as “violence/non-violence” become more complicated within this slim but profound text.
Text: The Bhagavadgita in the Mahabharata (tr. J.A.B. van Buitenen). University of Chicago Press, ISBN: 9780226846620
Eric Salem and Marsaura Shukla 2–4 p.m. MDT July 11–15, 2022 IN-PERSON
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway takes place on one day “in the middle of June” in 1923 in London and is written, as one commentator says, “in the language of what life feels like.” We meet Clarissa Dalloway as she walks across Regents Park to buy flowers for her party that evening, and we follow the stream-of-consciousness narrative from character to character as each moves through the London June day they share—and moves within his or her own interior world of memory and thought. In this modernist classic, Woolf explores with great subtlety the nature of our connection to each other and, ultimately, to ourselves. This exploration raises profound questions about how we find meaning in the life we build. “For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh...”
Text: Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway. Mariner Books, ISBN: 9780156628709
Krishnan Venkatesh and Ron Wilson 2–4 p.m. MDT July 11–15, 2022 IN-PERSON
During this week we study three samurai classics by the great Japanese director Kurosawa: Seven Samurai (1954), Yojimbo (1961), Sanjuro (1962). Although Kurosawa’s work ranged broadly among genres, he is best known for his vision of the samurai, usually embodied by the actor Toshiro Mifune. These films are all rich, poetic meditations on what it is to act in this difficult world, on how to live and how to die. Unforgettable for their action sequences, which are poetry in motion, these films are also of tremendous visual beauty and subtlety, while dripping with sardonic humor. The first three sessions are devoted to the epic Seven Samurai, and in the remaining two we study the shorter, somewhat quieter Yojimbo and Sanjuro. One big theme is the nature of the samurai—but not as a youthful ideal, for Kusosawa’s samurai is a world-weary, disillusioned older man with few ideals left. What is a hero without illusions?
Films:
The Science Institute Leslie Kay and Aparna Ravilochan 10 a.m.–Noon MDT and 2–4 p.m. MDT July 11–15, 2022 IN-PERSON
How can we understand brains? How do neurons work? We read the papers of early neuroscientists as they grapple with the nature of neurons, the mode by which they communicate, and the nature of their individual and cooperative activity. We begin with the neuron doctrine debate between Ramon y Cajal and Gerlach. We take up the papers of Loewi and Dale as they argue with Eccles on the nature of synaptic activity in the great “soup vs. sparks debate.” We marvel with Adrian as he discovers the nature of neural activity in the first analysis of action potentials and repeat his experiment in the laboratory. We explore Berger’s first use of electrodes to measure EEG in humans and try some ourselves. We round out the week discussing the neural substrates of memories, the singularity of consciousness, and the mechanisms underlying perception.
Text: Manual of readings provided
Claudia Hauer and Krishnan Venkatesh 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 18–22, 2022 IN-PERSON
Kazuo Ishiguro is a Nobel laureate and Booker Prize-winner whose masterpiece, When We Were Orphans, is a monument to the universal human nostalgia for lost childhood. The narrator’s parents disappeared during the Sino-Japanese revolution, and as he goes back to Shanghai to piece together the truth of what happened to them, the innocent memory of his childhood comes into conflict with Shanghai’s continued struggle to process the trauma of a historical atrocity. A novel that can be read on many levels, When We Were Orphans resonates powerfully as a commentary on innocence, memory, and the ways in which passions of youth can lead us down paths that shape our lives forever.
Text: Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans. Vintage, ISBN: 9780375724404
James Carey and Frank Pagano 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 18–22, 2022 IN-PERSON
In these two dialogues, Socrates converses with different types of human beings. In the Laches, he converses with men of action who are concerned about the education of their children. In the Protagoras, he converses with sophists who advertise themselves as educators. The virtue of courage becomes a central theme in both dialogues. Is the core of courage knowledge or is it something else? The Laches is thought to be an early dialogue. It seems straightforward in its development, though it is not without surprises. The Protagoras is wide-ranging and provocative. Among other things, we are given an example of the care with which Socrates read and, hence, guidance from Plato on how we should read.
Note: In the seminar we read only one dialogue from each of these two books.
Eric Salem and Sarah Stickney 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 18–22, 2022 IN-PERSON
The enormous acclaim Ferrante’s books have attracted over the past decade is well deserved; these novels are complex, moving, mysterious. They contain much that will repay study—the evocation of political turmoil in post-war Naples, the sweeping social scope, the piercingly well-drawn characters—but most compelling of all is the intense and enigmatic friendship between two women that lies at the heart of the books and constitutes their life. Ferrante’s novels manage to capture the feel of a larger cultural moment while preserving a revelatory psychological intimacy.
David Carl and David Townsend 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 18–22, 2022 IN-PERSON
“I study myself more than any other subject. This is my metaphysics, this is my physics,” Montaigne says in his essay “Of Experience.” Montaigne’s essays have influenced writers and thinkers from Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Emerson, and the French existentialists to 21st-century bloggers. In a range of essays on deceptively simple topics, Montaigne finds occasion to reflect on life’s most fundamental questions: What is the good life? How do I prepare for death? How can my experiences in life teach me to be a better person? These essays are deeply informed by Montaigne’s intimate knowledge of the Bible and of the classic authors of Greece and Rome, yet they are radically modern in their sense of selfhood as it emerges through the acts of reading, thinking, and writing. As such, Montaigne’s work stands as a bridge between the classic traditions that form the foundation of our shared Western heritage and our modern sense of individuality, freedom, and personal expression. Montaigne may have set out to shape his thoughts to language in these short essays, but in so doing he discovered that the self is an ever-developing creation that results from the exercise of our creative energies.
Text: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne (tr. Donald M. Frame). Stanford University Press, ISBN: 9780804704861
Steve Forde and David Townsend 2–4 p.m. MDT July 18–22, 2022 IN-PERSON
Alison Chapman and Grant Franks 2–4 p.m. MDT July 18–22, 2022 IN-PERSON
“riverun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” So begins Finnegans Wake, possibly the most challenging assemblage of words ever created. After the publication of Ulysses, James Joyce spent seventeen years writing this book. Undoubtedly controversial, some think it incomprehensible, while others believe it to be a masterpiece. In the words of Joseph Campbell, the Wake is a “[r]unning riddle and fluid answer … a mighty allegory of the fall and resurrection of mankind.” It is hilarious in some places and puzzling in many others. This weeklong session aims to be a gentle introduction to the Wake. We do not attempt to read the book as a whole or even dream of doing so. Instead, we begin at the opening pages, working slowly backward and forward through the first and last chapters, or as much of them as the class wishes to read. We aim to read enough text to convey the scope of Wake’s pleasures and invite participants to continue, if they wish, to enjoy this “continuous present tense integument [which] slowly unfold[s] all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history.”
Text: James Joyce, Finnegans Wake. Penguin Classics, ISBN: 9780141181264
Charlie Barrett and Michael Golluber 2–4 p.m. MDT July 18–22, 2022 IN-PERSON
The class focuses on two authors, Mark Twain and James Baldwin, both of whom use the paradigm of race to reframe American claims to originality, probity, and individualism. In Pudd’nhead Wilson, Twain mocks racial identity as a cultural illusion that abrogates individuality and masks a deeper illusion about moral clarity. Elevating humor as the proper lens through which to approach race as a tragic construct, Twain reduces slavery, America’s original sin, to mere farce with a malignant punchline: Who will survive in America? Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” grapples with crafting an authentic mode of self-expression for the man whose birthright is a humanistic tradition that discounts his humanity. From this peculiar perspective, Baldwin seeks to claim for Black Americans a language of their own, while impeaching the integrity of the origin story that situates America as the first nation founded upon the enlightenment principles of equality and freedom. As a class we explore how Twain’s novel and Baldwin’s essay each investigate the American experiment.
David Carl and Krishnan Venkatesh 2–4 p.m. MDT July 18–22, 2022 IN-PERSON
In the second week of our course on the history of Japanese cinema, we study three of the most influential films in one of Japan’s most influential film genres: horror. Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan (1965) is based on 19th-century Japanese folk tales. The four tales that comprise this film examine different aspects of the role of horror and fantasy in Japanese traditional and popular culture, encompassing the erotic, the family, and a range of social and power relations. Set in the 14th century during a historic period of civil war in Japan, Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba (1964) is a horror film that chronicles the impact of war on individuals and the relationship between love and both the real and fantastical horrors of violence in wartime. At the end of the week, we move from these classic examples of Japanese cinema that helped define the horror movie genre to Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998), a film that explores the end-of-the-century anxiety around media and technology. Combining elements of Japanese pop culture with the country’s rich history of ghost stories, Ringu helped reinvent the notion of cinematic horror and inspired a series of North American remakes and sequels that are still shaping and influencing our understanding of “scary movies” today.
Patricia Greer and David Townsend 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 25–29, 2022 IN-PERSON
“The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of ... We know the truth not only by reason, but by the heart.” Pascal’s Pensées of a thousand brief reflections connects the depth and mystery of experience to the clear relations and boundaries of mathematical order and insight. His famous “wager” argument for the existence of God is just one example of his wit, heart, faith, love, and hope. We reflect on his rapier-like intellect and true humility with our careful reading and discussion. Pascal’s ideas and images are as fresh today as when he first transcribed them.
Text: Pascal, Pensées (tr. A.J. Krailsheimer). Penguin Classics, ISBN: 9780140446456
Nicholas Bellinson and Aparna Ravilochan Time: 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 25–29, 2022 IN-PERSON
“…[F]rom all these things a sort of divine delight gets hold upon me and a shuddering, because nature thus by your power has been so manifestly laid open and uncovered in every part.” Lucretius’s great poem “On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura)” presents a comprehensive and disturbing vision of the world based in Epicurean philosophy. Here the gods are uninvolved in and unconcerned with human experience. The world as we know it will one day (maybe tomorrow!) fall into ruin, and free will exists thanks to the swerving of elementary particles. Lucretius aims to free the human mind of superstition and the evils it causes by instructing us in the true nature of things. But how does natural philosophy inform moral philosophy? What is a mind in a world composed entirely of bodies? And how can one find tranquility amid the turbulence of nature’s creations and destructions? Join us as we spend the week investigating such questions, pondering along the way the causes of thunderstorms, dreams, sexual desire, and other mysterious natural phenomena.
Texts (the verse or prose recommendations are below):
Michael Dink and Rebecca Goldner 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 25–29, 2022 IN-PERSON
Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way begins the exploration of memory, time, identity, and writing that comprises In Search of Lost Time. Here we begin with the narrator revisiting his childhood, both his summers in Combray with his family and his life in Paris, playing on the Champs-Elysees. We find a boy who lives in books and thinks, even at a young age, about whether he will ever be a writer. But in the middle of these boyhood recollections, we discover the story of Charles Swann and learn of his obsessive, jealous desire for Odette—a story that haunts our narrator’s childhood, becomes the motif for his future love affairs, and permeates his own memories.
Text: Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (tr. Lydia Davis). Penguin Classics, ISBN: 9780142437964
Alison Chapman and Maggie McGuinness 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 25–29, 2022 IN-PERSON
Ceremony opens with a poetic invocation informing us that stories “are all we have to fight off illness and death.” The novel follows Tayo, a half-Laguna Pueblo, half-Anglo WWII veteran as he struggles to reintegrate into his culture while wrestling with PTSD. His traumatic flashbacks are echoed in the narrative itself, which braids together timelines that span Tayo’s childhood, his time in military service, and the ancient myths of the Laguna Pueblo people. Gallup, New Mexico, the story’s setting, is a town similarly suspended across time, with its past as a Native American site, its present as a city in transition, and its future infused with apocalyptic threat, represented by the nearby Trinity nuclear tests. In this seminar, we consider the role that storytelling and tradition play in healing and building bridges between old and new worlds, how a deep connection to place makes such traditions possible, and what happens when such places come under threat.
Text: Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony. Penguin Books, ISBN: 9780143104919
Michael Golluber and Ned Walpin 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 25–29, 2022 IN-PERSON
Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde might be the greatest opera in history. A love story of the most fervent of enemies, it delves deeply into the relationships of love and death, art and reason, and hopelessness and salvation, all through Wagner’s revolutionary “total work of art,” or Gesamtkunstwerk. An opera that’s surprisingly accessible with the help of a few tools (which we provide), Tristan und Isolde overwhelms with its astonishing beauty. We experience that beauty firsthand at a live Santa Fe Opera performance, one that is sure to be unforgettable.
Seth Appelbaum and Michael Golluber 2–4 p.m. MDT July 25–29, 2022 IN-PERSON
What subterranean passions are buried beneath our civilized institutions? Aeschylus excavates them in his Oresteia, a trilogy of plays that recount the murder of Greek king Agamemnon by his wife, Clytemnestra, her subsequent murder by their son Orestes, and the rescue of Orestes by the gods Apollo and Athena from the matricide-avenging Furies. By the end of the sequence, a sordid palace coup and its aftermath have resulted in the birth of a new form of justice. In the course of these tragedies, Aeschylus brings to light the primal tensions that usually stay hidden in all societies: between mother and father, family and political community, justice and vengeance, and divine law and human law, as well as many other fundamental problems. Join us as we explore these mysterious and fascinating texts.
Text: Aeschylus, Oresteia (tr. Christopher Collard). Oxford University Press, ISBN: 9780199537815
Leah Lasell and Ken Wolfe 2–4 p.m. MDT July 25–29, 2022 IN-PERSON
What do you do when the plague comes to your city? When it hits Florence in 1348, seven young women and three young men take refuge at a country villa and find diversion in the imagination by each taking a turn telling a story for ten days in a row. The tales that result tell of love and joy, love and woe, fortune and misfortune. Boccaccio’s Decameron is a witty, elegant, and thoughtful collection of a hundred stories. It had a great influence on Chaucer and is the first major work of Italian prose literature. We read the first five of the ten “days.”
Text: Boccaccio, The Decameron (tr. G.H. McWilliam). Penguin Classics, ISBN: 9780140449303
Aparna Ravilochan and Krishnan Venkatesh 2–4 p.m. MDT July 25–29, 2022 IN-PERSON
Although Kurosawa and Mizoguchi may be the best-known of the great Japanese directors, Ozu was the greatest—not only for his exquisite and understated visual sensibility and his carefully crafted stories but, above all, for his insight into familial relationships and his wisdom about the human soul throughout the stages of the life cycle. He is like an older, more contemplative version of Jane Austen, able to understand deeply both the very young and the very old, not only the marriageable. Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953) is frequently named among the three greatest films of all time. In this session we study Tokyo Story, Late Spring (1949), and the enchanting silent comedy I Was Born, But … (1932). Our approach is to see the film, not just the story, and in the process become more skilled and sensitive watchers of film. We attend to some of the technical aspects, constantly asking how the films move us as films. Most importantly, we take a rare opportunity to study one of the 20th century’s greatest (and wisest) artists, one who quickly becomes a lifelong companion.
The Science Institute David Carl and Paola Villa 10 a.m.–Noon MDT and 2–4 p.m. MDT July 25–29, 2022 IN-PERSON
Knowledge and taste share a long common cultural history. To “have good taste” is an ordinary expression indicating the ability to make good choices. But what is taste? Is it objective? How is it connected to language? Can we read with our tongues? Gastronomy provides a useful framework for exploring the familiar yet ephemeral idea of taste in its philosophical, artistic, and scientific ramifications. We study flavor through a selection of cookbooks, literary texts, scientific works, and hands-on culinary experiments. Treating the kitchen as a laboratory, we reflect on how geometry affects flavor around a plate of pasta and study the relationships between time, temperature, and pressure while preparing a bowl of stock. The sole prerequisite for this class is a healthy appetite for knowledge.
Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking. Scribner Books, ISBN: 9780684800011
César Vega, Job Ubbink, Erik van der Linden, eds., The Kitchen as Laboratory. Columbia University Press, ISBN: 9780231153454
Manual of additional readings provided
All online seminars will use the Zoom platform.
Topi Heikkero and Ian Moore Noon–2 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 4–8, 2022 ONLINE
Meister Eckhart is a central figure of the Western mystical tradition—a master of apophatic theology and medieval Christian Neoplatonic philosophy. We read a representative series of Meister Eckhart’s most influential writings. These are a selection from his German sermons and his treatise “On Detachment.” This treatise addresses the key teaching of Eckhart’s: releasement, or detachment (gelazenheit, abgescheidenheit). We begin with a Christmas sermon cycle and culminate with his perhaps most well-known sermon on the beatitude “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Readings are fairly short, because we aim for a close, careful, and reflective reading of these challenging texts.
Rebecca Goldner and Dan Harrell Noon–2 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 4–8, 2022 ONLINE
Shirley Jackson’s work has been described as suspense, horror, and Gothic, but at the core her stories are inundated by familiarity and strangeness. The stories collected in Dark Tales range from those with unusual twists to outright suspense, but they are tied together by their attention to the mundane, to the ordinary details of life, and to their sudden appearance as strange. To describe any of Jackson’s stories is to risk altering (perhaps spoiling) the pleasure of reading them, but they offer an opportunity to explore questions about fear, isolation, and the art of writing stories such as these. As we read two stories a day, our week is bookended with two of the most well-known tales in the collection, “The Possibility of Evil” and “The Summer People.”
Text: Shirley Jackson, Dark Tales. Penguin Classics, ISBN: 9780143132004
Judith Adam and Louis Petrich Noon–2 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 4–8, 2022 ONLINE
Anton Chekhov became a world master of the short story by developing a supreme talent for writing briefly, simply, boldly, dramatically, and truthfully about the biggest things in human life. In just five to fifteen pages, his work encompasses life’s tragic and comic dimensions in a mood that now bears his name, “Chekhovian”—used to describe a feeling of profound loss rendered sadly pleasant by the transformative power of humor, which is fused poetically throughout the whole. How beautiful life could be—how much better men and women may become—when they are made to see what they really are, body and soul, wasting away in vulgarity, their healthiness rendered present as storied possibility. Participants experience this creed of Chekhov by discussing a number of his generally acknowledged masterpieces in a genre that he, as much as anyone, elevated to the highest ranks of art.
Text: Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov’s Selected Stories (ed. Cathy Popkin). W.W. Norton & Company, ISBN: 9780393925302
David Townsend and Krishnan Venkatesh Noon–2 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 4–8, 2022 ONLINE
Basic Buddhism 1 is not a pre-requisite for this course. All are welcome.
The description of Basic Buddhism 1 read: “What is Buddhism? What does the Buddha actually say, and what are his reasons? During this week we study selections from the Pali Discourses, the earliest recorded versions of the Buddha’s teachings. These are never merely memorable aphorisms but dialogues and sustained arguments that open up in conversation. We talk about mindfulness, craving, and the roots of human discontent, as well as the classical philosophical topics of causation, change, and immortality.” Basic Buddhism 2 encompasses a different set of conversations that deepen our consideration of these questions and lead us into some unexpected places. Is there a soul? Is there life after death? How should we think about our fundamental relationships? Instead of a single book, our readings—drawn from several of the books of early discourses—are a selection of excellent translations available free online, for which links are supplied with the syllabus: the Sigalovada Sutta, the Kodhana Sutta, the Kalama Sutta, the Mahasudassana Sutta, the Ratthapala Sutta, the Potthapada Sutta, and the Samannaphala Sutta. No prior experience of Buddhist texts is necessary to study these works.
Text: A selection of links to digital translations provided
Khafiz Kerimov and David Townsend 4–6 p.m. EDT / 2–4 p.m. MDT July 4–8, 2022 ONLINE
Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin is a novel in verse that is considered to mark the beginning of modern Russian literature and language. Bored with city life, the novel’s protagonist, the dandy Eugene Onegin, travels to the countryside where he meets the young and passionate Tatiana. The reader is challenged to separate the romance of life in imaginative stories from the deadly consequences of social conventions. Pushkin plunges us into the tragic love between Onegin and Tatiana as we experience richly all that Russian critic Belinsky called “an encyclopedia of Russian life.”
Text Translations: Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin
David Carl and Kit Slover 6–8 p.m. EDT / 4–6 p.m. MDT July 4–8, 2022 ONLINE
Although never published as a book during Nietzsche’s lifetime, The Will to Power, a posthumously edited selection from his late notebooks, is in many ways one of his most personal and representative works, combining the fragmentary and anti-systematic style of his aphoristic writing with the exploratory nature of his wide-ranging and groundbreaking thinking. This volume brings together Nietzsche’s thoughts on nihilism, religion, politics, morality, aesthetics, metaphysics, and the history of philosophy, while exploring several of his central ideas, such as the will to power, and the eternal return, as well as the figure of Dionysus as a counterpoint to Christ and the Christian influence on the development of modern European and Western society and culture. We read a curated selection of these notebook entries that introduce—and offer deeper insights into—some of Nietzsche’s most challenging ideas.
Text: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (tr. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale). Vintage, ISBN: 9780394704371
The Science Institute Christopher Cohoon and Peter Pesic Noon–2 p.m. EDT /10 a.m.–Noon MDT and 4–6 p.m. EDT / 2–4 p.m. MDT July 4–8, 2022 ONLINE
Even if you don’t think you love math, Euclid’s beautiful geometry may change your mind. We spend two days with Book I from Elements, his classic compilation that has taught the world geometry for more than two and a half millennia. Then we turn to Nikolai Lobachevsky’s “imaginary geometry” from his book Geometrical Researches on the Theory of Parallels, a prime source of non-Euclidean geometry that is no less coherent and captivating than Euclid, though much more startling. Both geometries are accessible to anyone with a high school education. The affinities and contrasts between these two geometries—even more vivid when studied close together—offer an unparalleled feast for the mind and the imagination.
Guillermo Bleichmar and Peter Pesic Noon–2 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 11–15, 2022 ONLINE
At the heart of China’s extraordinary poetic tradition lives its unique language. We explore a group of poems by some of its greatest poets (such as Li Bai, Du Fu, Wang Wei) through examining how Chinese characters can create meaning and mood. We presume no prior knowledge of Chinese, whose fundamental structure allows such access without the elaborate grammars intrinsic to Indo-European languages. We begin with the poem’s characters and dictionary entries and, through experiment and discussion, see how they may be construed, comparing our work with a variety of translations. Reading poems of love, war, loss, and friendship, we encounter one of the world’s greatest literary traditions.
Philip LeCuyer and David Townsend Noon–2 p.m EDT / 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 11–15, 2022 ONLINE
Tolstoy’s last major novel, Resurrection, was written in 1899, thirty years after War and Peace and twenty years after Anna Karenina. It has the same seemingly effortless, sensuous acuity and freshness of those earlier works, but here, at age 71, Tolstoy is seeking a less historical and less society-based experience of truth. In Resurrection he marshals his artistic gifts around a fundamental moral insight that possibly could sustain him as an individual facing mortality. The novel vastly expands Tolstoy’s vision of who and what is in the world, and it stands as his personal response.
Text: Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection (tr. Anthony Briggs). Penguin Classics, ISBN: 9780140424638
Brendan Boyle and David Townsend 3–5 p.m. EDT / 1–3 p.m. MDT July 11–15, 2022 ONLINE
*JUST ADDED* Mary Halper and David Townsend 7–9 p.m. EDT / 5–7 p.m. MDT July 11–15, 2022 ONLINE
Two of Plato’s most fundamental dialogues take us deeply into reflections on truth, language, philosophy, education, and love. Meno is an orientation seminar for the St. John’s method and mission. Its deceptively simple surface covers turbulence in the depths of the soul. Phaedrus appears similarly playful in presenting the way of teaching and learning between the elderly Socrates and his young pupil. Both dialogues excite wonder as you explore your personal relationship with the life of the mind, thinking, ideas, your love of wisdom, and the soul.
Allison DeWitt and Ken Wolfe 6–8 p.m. EDT / 4–6 p.m. MDT July 11–15, 2022 ONLINE
We read selections from the Qur'an in order, exploring the themes and concepts expounded in the text, paying particular attention to the literary aspects of the work. We attempt to experience this text both as the founding doctrine of one of the world’s largest religions and as an intimate and personal collection of verses. While reading the text in the order in which it was compiled, we also remain aware of the order in which the verses were revealed, considering how the two different chronologies complement each other. This course is equally accessible to those familiar with the Islamic tradition and those discovering it for the first time.
Text: The Qur'an (tr. M.A.S. Abdel Haleem). OUP Oxford, ISBN: 9780199535958
Join the mailing list
Follow our Facebook page
For questions or assistance:
505-984-6105santafe.classics(at)sjc.edu
