Events, Classes, and Seminars
We have moved many of our offerings online! We hope you will join us.
June 2020
Delve Readers Seminars
Delve Online: Best Friends Forever: Female Friendship in Literature
Tue, June 23 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
“It would be ten years before they saw each other again, and their meeting would be thick with birds.” This Delve will explore female friendship, as written by women writers, through both a fiction and nonfiction lens. These friendships are complex and nuanced, sometimes ugly, sometimes enduring, and sometimes one of the most significant relationships of a lifetime. Through Toni Morrison's beautiful and stirring Sula and Nel, Hungarian writer Szabo's unlikely relationship between a woman and her housekeeper in The…
Find out moreJuly 2020
Delve Readers Seminars
Summer 2020 Delve Online: Nigerian Voices: Chinua Achebe and Helon Habila
Tue, July 7 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
From the precolonial period to modern times, these two authors show the complexity of Nigerian history: the original tribal forms of organizing the society, where the strong man rules for good and for bad; the colonial era where those tribal communities transform in order to negotiate with the colonizers; and the postcolonial period that shows how the thirst for oil from the western powers also generates conflicts between the native peoples and a level of corruption that pervade every aspect…
Find out more
Delve Readers Seminars
Delve Online: Milan Kundera
Thu, July 9 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Explore Czech writer Kundera alongside some of his inspirations. We will begin with his most famous work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, reading both the original text and exploring major influences on this work, through excerpts from Kafka and Nietzsche. We will also read his novel Immortality and short story collection Laughable Loves. We will discuss what is distinctive about Kundera's style, such as his lyrical writing…
Find out more
Delve Readers Seminars
Delve Online: The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Metamorphosis
Wed, July 15 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
In her book The Ethics of Ambiguity, the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir asks us to consider what it means to exercise individual freedom and to live in community with others. Where does our individual freedom begin and end? Simone de Beauvoir claims that our personal freedom can be manifest only when we “will others free.” How do we create a life where we protect our individual freedom and work toward the freedom of our neighbor? Can both forms of freedom…
Find out moreAugust 2020
Delve Readers Seminars
Delve Online: Ritual, Redemption, and Epiphany
Wed, August 5 from 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
4 week Delve online. This Delve Seminar explores the common human experiences of redemption and epiphany and the role that ritual can play in ushering in such profound moments. Through our texts, we’ll examine how ritual can be used to protect societal structures as well as shift culture, how the tension between what has been and what might be leads to necessary conflict within the self, and how the power of acute experience ushers in clarity and the capacity for change.
Find out more
Delve Readers Seminars
Delve Online: Contemporary Korean Fiction
Thu, August 20 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
A look at 3 contemporary Korean writers. From a haunting meditation on grief to a powerful examination on capitalism, participants will discuss the themes that bind and distinguish these texts.Discussions will also focus on how translation affects our understanding of these novels as well as elements of Korean culture and current affairs that are uniquely reflected in these works. This seminar is offered exclusively for people of color Reading List: The White Book, Han Kang The Impossible Fairy, Han Yujoo…
Find out moreSeptember 2020
Delve Readers Seminars
William James: Inventing an American Philosophy
Sun, September 6 from 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Six-week Seminar: The philosophy of William James (1842–1910) has had world-wide influence, and yet it is in many ways an essentially American view of the nature and humanity. James was a psychologist by training. This study led him to develop his unique view of human experience, out of which grew his profound concept of the nature of knowledge and reality as the way in which we act in the world and experience life.
Find out more
Delve Readers Seminars
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Thu, September 10 from 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Six-week Seminar: Composed in the era of the Second World War, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings has become, through various incarnations, one of the best known stories in the world and also part of a larger system of myth and lore--thee so-called "Tolkien universe"--that also includes the Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and countless additional tales in prose and verse.
Find out more
