Delve Readers Seminars In-person
White Teeth
Written when she was only 25 years old, White Teeth catapulted Zadie Smith into renown as one of the most exciting authors in the English language. This profound & humorous
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Events, Classes, and Seminars
Our events, classes, and seminars bring the community together to hear, learn, and discuss the most compelling issues and ideas of our day. We hope you will join us in our downtown Literary Arts space, online, and at partnering venues across Portland and Oregon.
Delve Readers Seminars In-person
“First – Poets – Then the Sun”: Emily Dickinson’s Craft, Life, and Legacy
Emily Dickinson has achieved the rarest of distinctions for a nineteenth-century poet (and a female one at that): lasting, evolving fame. Having escaped the confines of academic study and school
Delve Readers Seminars In-person
Henri Bergson and the Revolution in Time
In 1889 Henri Bergson's (1858-1941) bestseller Time and Free Will inaugurated a vast revolution of the understanding of time in world philosophy that was a keystone in the literature, art,
Delve for Writers Delve Readers Seminars In-person Writing Classes
Delve for Writers: Joan Didion and Durga Chew-Bose
Delve for Writers is a new, occasional Delve series that offers seminars that focus on close readings of narrative, form, and stylistic choices that writers can incorporate into their own
Delve Readers Seminars In-person
An Intensive Study of Totality: Jorge Luis Borges
The Argentine genius Jorge Luis Borges explored every facet of the word during his lifetime of writing. From sonnets about dream tigers to stories about detectives in Buenos Aires to
Delve Readers Seminars In-person Winter 2023
Vanity Fair
Vanity Fair (“A Novel without a Hero”), by William Makepeace Thackeray (1848), belongs on the same shelf with other towering novels of the Victorian age: Bleak House, Middlemarch, Jane Eyre, and The Way We Live Now. Its protagonist, Becky Sharp, is one of the most tantalizing, bewitching, infuriating, charming, scheming, and amoral characters in all
Delve Readers Seminars In-person Winter 2023
The Feminine Gothic: Victorian and American Horror
Novels of ghosts and haunted landscapes can open the door to discussions of sociology and repression, trauma, and the cathartic function of horror. In this seminar, we will examine themes of possession, repression, haunting, and the mad woman in the attic in three Victorian and American horror novels from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries:
Delve Readers Seminars In-person Winter 2023
Plato On Love
The Symposium by Plato asks: what is love? It is the story of a banquet in classical Athens, attended by Socrates and his friends, at which each person tells a story about the origin of Love. These stories are full of deep psychological insight, powerful mythic imagination, and profound philosophical reflection that have made The
Delve Readers Seminars In-person Winter 2023
The Brothers Karamazov
The American novelist Walker Percy described The Brothers Karamazov as “maybe the greatest novel of all time . . . . almost prophesies and prefigures everything—all the bloody mess and the issues of the 20th century.” It’s fair to extend Percy’s observation to include the mess of the present century as well. The Brothers K
Delve Readers Seminars In-person Winter 2023
A Borderland Study: Who Drew This Line
What is a border? Who does it serve? Who gets to draw it? This seminar will interrogate our understanding of the border as a static entity by witnessing its creation, listening to those who have documented its development and studying how ever-changing policies continue to influence the lives of those on all sides of the
Delve Readers Seminars In-person Spring 2023
Introduction to Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past
Proust’s magnum opus is often considered to be the greatest novel of the 20th century. It richly repays the careful attention it demands, and becomes unforgettable. First-time readers, however, may find the style and size of the work daunting. This seminar is intended for participants who have always wanted to read Proust, but who would
Delve Readers Seminars In-person Spring 2023
Absalom, Absalom
Published in 1936, William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! takes his favored subject--the legacy of slavery and the Civil War--and his imagined setting--Mississippi's Yoknapatawpha County--to new heights of development. Set in the period before, during, and after the Civil War, it focuses on the life of Thomas Sutpen, an aspiring plantation owner and patriarch, and his descendants.
Delve Readers Seminars In-person Spring 2023
Barbara Pym: Excellent Women and Quartet In Autumn
“A list of furniture is not a good beginning to a letter, though I dare say a clever person with a fantastic turn of mind could transform even a laundry list into a poem.” Mildred Lathbury, the “excellent woman” at the heart of Barbara Pym’s 1952 comedy of manners, is full of such opinions and
Delve Readers Seminars In-person Spring 2023
“Beneath every history, another history”: Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall
With the death of Hilary Mantel in September 2022 we lost one of the greatest writers of our time. Mantel’s books are so original, and so different from one another, that it’s often difficult to believe they were written by the same novelist. Her brilliant language, dark humor, and inventive, impeccable craft make everything she
Delve Readers Seminars In-person
Henry David Thoreau: Journals
Thoreau’s Journal is one of the greatest piece of American nature-writing and one of the greatest intellectual achievements in world literature. As Virginia Woolf said, in the Journal "we have a chance of getting to know Thoreau as few people are known." Thoreau considered his journals his central literary endeavor. They are, among other things,
Delve Readers Seminars In-person
Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past: Within a Budding Grove
Proust’s magnum opus is often considered to be the greatest novel of the 20th century. It richly repays the careful attention it demands, and becomes unforgettable. First-time readers, however, may find the style and size of the work daunting. This seminar is intended for participants who have always wanted to read Proust, but who would
Delve Readers Seminars In-person
‘Driven toward endings’: A.S. Byatt’s Possession
Reviewing A.S. Byatt’s Possession in The New York Times, Jay Parini declared it “a tour de force that opens every narrative device of English fiction to inspection without, for a moment, ceasing to delight.” Readers agreed. The novel was a surprise bestseller and was awarded the 1990 Booker Prize. It was subsequently adapted as a
Delve Readers Seminars Fall 2023 In-person
Ursula K. Le Guin: The Hainish Cycle
The Left Hand of Darkness, The Word for World is Forest, & The Dispossessed are three of the most iconic novels by the legendary author Ursula K. Le Guin. Written within less than five years of each other, these novels all occur in the same science fiction universe that is most often referred to as
Delve Readers Seminars Fall 2023 In-person
Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past: Place Names: the Place
Proust’s magnum opus is often considered to be the greatest novel of the 20th century. It richly repays the careful attention it demands, and becomes unforgettable. First-time readers, however, may find the style and size of the work daunting. This seminar is intended for participants who have always wanted to read Proust, but who would
Delve Readers Seminars Fall 2023 In-person
He Knew He Was Right: Anthony Trollope
Nathaniel Hawthorne marveled at Anthony Trollope’s talent for conveying the truth of human experience, declaring his fictional world to be “just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth, and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting
Delve Readers Seminars Fall 2023 In-person
Derek Walcott: Omeros
Published in 1990, Omeros is the masterwork of the Nobel Prize winning Saint Lucien writer Derek Walcott, a book-length epic poem that invites comparisons with Homer while also probing the history and culture of his island home, the "Helen of the West Indies," and his own life as a well travelled writer. Divided into seven
Delve Readers Seminars Fall 2023 In-person
Washington Square
Catherine Sloper is young—not clever, not quick, not ugly—and rich. Into her life in New York City’s fashionable Washington Square comes Morris Townsend—“the most beautiful young man in the world.”
Delve Readers Seminars In-person Winter 2024
Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past: The Guermantes way
Proust’s magnum opus is often considered to be the greatest novel of the 20th century. It richly repays the careful attention it demands, and becomes unforgettable. First-time readers, however, may
Delve Readers Seminars In-person Winter 2024
Selling your Soul for Fun and Profit: Faustian Bargains
The Faust Legend takes up the question of selling your soul to the devil for magical success in this world. This Delve seminar looks at the legend in three famous
Delve Readers Seminars In-person Winter 2024
“Lucid Abnormality”: The Short Stories of Elizabeth Bowen on the Homefront in World War II
Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) was maybe the greatest short story writer in English that you might not have read. In this Delve, we will read the two dozen stories she wrote
Delve Readers Seminars In-person Winter 2024
José Saramago’s Allegories of the Human Condition
In this Delve, we will read Portuguese Nobel-laureate José Saramago’s breathtaking novel, Blindness (1995), focusing in particular on the concept of “community.” The novel posits the trope of community as
Delve Readers Seminars In-person Winter 2024
The Anti-Western: Cormac McCarthy, Carmen Boullosa and the Myth of the American West
The Wild West has always been a fiction. The heroic cowboy settling the frontier is a myth. The Western novels of the mid-20th century rewrote genocide & colonialism to justify
Delve Readers Seminars In-person Spring 2024
Homer, The Iliad: the Emily Wilson translation
Emily Wilson's new translation of the Iliad, building on the accomplishment of her recent translation of the Odyssey, has kindled fresh interest in Homer's perennially relevant war epic. In this
Delve for Writers Delve Readers Seminars In-person Spring 2024
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
DELVE FOR WRITERS: An occasional Delve series that offers seminars that focus on close readings of narrative, form, and stylistic choices that writers can incorporate into their own writing practice.
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