Events, Classes, and Seminars

This Delve seminar will focus on Hawthorne’s short stories—among the most thrilling, strange, and memorable in the American canon. We will explore his first collection of stories, Twice-Told Tales (1837, 1851) as well as a small selection of extraordinary later stories.

In this Delve we will study Adorno's Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life---the amazing book he wrote between 1944 and 1949 to explore his feelings about the calamitous situation of a world facing despotism.

This is an important novella in the vein of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, but with an ending that packs a different punch. At its center is a man torn between family, community, church, and one young woman in a terrible predicament. He must make a choice, and Keegan’s exquisite, concise writing reveals that agonizing choice. It’s a perfect story to ponder and discuss: What would you choose in his situation?

Second section added for Tuesday nights. This is an important novella in the vein of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, but with an ending that packs a different punch. At its center is a man torn between family, community, church, and one young woman in a terrible predicament. He must make a choice, and Keegan’s exquisite, concise writing reveals that agonizing choice. It’s a perfect story to ponder and discuss: What would you choose in his situation?

Dickens turns his pen onto a satiric look London’s pursuit of Money and Society, and a bitter one at the state of the poor and those whose living are derived from the great and polluted River Thames, the powerful controlling symbol that unites many of the characters and plots in the novel.

Through journaling and discussion, we’ll work our way toward a greater understanding of the novel Tokyo Ueno Station’s view on contemporary Japan, and the fractured structure Yu employs to explore one man’s memories. Over the course of our time together, we’ll gain insights into our own places, decisions, losses, and joys, reading and journaling toward a finer understanding of life’s fragility and resilience.

In this four week Delve, we’ll revisit four iconic works of middle grade fiction—Island of the Blue Dolphins, Hatchet, Julie of the Wolves, and Jacob Have I Loved. We will come to these books as adults with new questions. Throughout the course, we will weave between how the books existed in their time and what they have to offer us now.