Events, Classes, and Seminars
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March 2021
Delve Readers Seminars Winter 2021
History of the Peloponnesian War
Wed, March 3 from 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm PST
The Peloponnesian War is the Ancient Greek historian Thucydides's account of the strife, conflict, civil war, and military and political catastrophe he witnessed and lived through as a citizen of Athens during and after the reign of the great Pericles in the 5th century BCE--the height of the classical period. A lifelong student of democracy, his meticulous and dramatic analysis of the decades-long strife between Athens and Sparta presents a complex and probing picture of politics, character, and what he…
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Delve Readers Seminars Winter 2021
Imagining the Future: Dystopic and Utopic Fiction
Tue, March 9 from 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm PST
Many of us have described the past year as “apocalyptic” or “dystopian.” We’ve been living through a global pandemic, a critical presidential election, ravaging wildfires, and a national reckoning with our country’s legacy of racism and police violence. Utopic and dystopic fiction can help us make sense of our experience and ask questions about our future. In this seminar we’ll read three works of utopic and dystopic fiction written by women authors. In our reading and discussion of each text,…
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Delve Readers Seminars Spring 2021
Søren Kierkegaard: What is Our Situation?
Sun, March 14 from 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm PDT
In the six meetings of our Delve seminar we will read selections from books by Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), a philosopher of the highest importance and influence in general philosophy, moral philosophy, and religious thought. In Western philosophy, he stands with Plato and Nietzsche alone as a literary stylist of the greatest genius. The most familiar characterization of Kierkegaard is that he is the founder of existentialism. In this seminar we will try as best we can to look at him…
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Delve Readers Seminars Winter 2021
Joy Harjo: American Sunrise
Thu, March 25 from 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm PDT
...we still want justice. We are still America. We know the rumors of our demise. We spit them out. They die soon. -Joy Harjo,“American Sunrise” Our current poet laureate Joy Harjo describes her work as writing that both “tells the truth and creates the truth", providing a “memory on which to build.” Harjo, a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, is the author of nine books of poetry, one memoir, several plays, children’s books, and most recently, the editor of…
Find out moreApril 2021
BIPOC only Delve Readers Seminars Spring 2021
Five Contemporary Poets: Clifton, Harjo, Komunyaaka and More
Wed, April 14 from 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm PDT
A Delve for BIPOC participants only A survey of five contemporary poets and their volumes of selected poems. We will focus on each poet’s body of work, starting with Lucille Clifton, then moving through the works of Joy Harjo, Yusef Komunyaaka, Arthur Sze, and Tracy K. Smith. By reading books that collect poems over decades, we will access each poet’s progressions in content, form, and style, as well as comprehensively approach the historical and cultural contexts reflected. Spending significant time…
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Delve Readers Seminars Spring 2021
New York City: Paul Auster and Jonathan Safran Foer
Wed, April 28 from 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm PDT
Paul Auster and Jonathan Safran Foer are two contemporary authors who have explored New York City not only as a space where a person works, transits, and lives, but more as a symbolic space at a certain time that interacts with the fictional characters as if the city were also one of them—a living entity that actively affects the fates and actions of every person that inhabits it. Memory, chance, the double, and disobedience as a way to dig into…
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Delve Readers Seminars Spring 2021
The Madwoman in the Attic and the Monstrous Feminine
Tue, May 25 from 6:00 pm - 8:30 pm PDT
The “mad woman in the attic" is a common trope in gothic literature, but who is she? And how did she end up there? Integral to the gothic genre are stories of madness and haunting, which often serve as metaphors for social violence, race, gender and class warfare, and the abject. Stereotypically, the female protagonist in gothic literature plays the role of victim, but what about when she participates in her own monstrosity? In this seminar, we will explore some…
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