Events, Classes, and Seminars
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January 2021
Delve Readers Seminars Winter 2021
Nigerian Authors: Abi Dare and Akwake Emezi
Wed, Jan 13, 2021 from 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm PST
This seminar focuses on two Nigerian authors who rely on the use of foreign languages in their work. In The Girl With the Louding Voice, Abi Dare’s pidgin(broken English) is used in the narrator’s voice throughout the story. Discussions will include topics around class, race and the roles of children as domestics in African culture. In The Death of Vivek Oji, by Akwake Emezi, we will explore the story about the freedom of expressing one’s sexuality as it pertains to…
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Delve Readers Seminars Winter 2021
The “Middle space between languages”: Julia Alvarez and Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Sun, Jan 17, 2021 from 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm PST
This seminar will be an exploration of what Ingrid Rojas Contreras so accurately refers to as, “the middle space between languages,” in her essay, Translation as an Arithmetic of Loss. We will discuss the ways in which the characters in the two novels, Afterlife by Julia Alvarez and Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras, as well as the speakers in the additional poems, navigate the in-betweenness of being bilingual. Each text is a discovery of the ways…
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Delve Readers Seminars Winter 2021
Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler
Tue, Jan 26, 2021 from 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm PST
“The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren't any other kind and yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was through the trees.” Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower “You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.” Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed When the unimaginable is occurring, how do we navigate…
Find out moreFebruary 2021
Delve Readers Seminars Winter 2021
A Different Sort of Gilead: Marilynne Robinson
Tue, Feb 2, 2021 from 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm PST
Marilynne Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping, was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1982. In 2005, she was awarded the Pulitzer for her second novel, Gilead. In this seminar we will read both novels; a subsequent seminar will focus on Robinson’s third and fourth novels, which take up and expand upon the story told in Gilead. All novels are concerned with questions of family, home, memory, and the often fraught nature of human relationships. In Housekeeping, two sisters struggle…
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Delve Readers Seminars Winter 2021
Dystopias of Turkish Modernity: Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book and Bilge Karasu’s Night
Thu, Feb 25, 2021 from 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm PST
This Delve seminar looks at two acclaimed authors of modern Turkish literature and their dystopian novels, The Black Book and Night. Dystopian narratives portray oppressive systems, and they display a deep suspicion of power structures and their alliance with scientific progress and technology. Published in 1985 in the aftermath of a brutal military coup in Turkey, Night depicts a violent secretive regime set out to murder its dissidents. Dystopian imagery of an unnamed city is permeated with dismembered bodies, silence,…
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