Delve Readers Seminars Online
Etgar Keret: Short Fiction as Social Commentary
Etgar Keret is one of the most important Israeli authors alive today. He has mastered the genre of short fiction with a witticism that uses humor and farce to make
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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 Online
Orhan Pamuk’s Nights of Plague: Fairy Tale, History, Allegory
In this seminar we will explore Orhan Pamuk’s new novel, Nights of Plague, an epic narrative which depicts the outbreak of the bubonic plague in the late Ottoman era during
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,
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
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
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
BIPOC only Delve Readers Seminars Winter 2023
Language as resistance, words as collage: Don Mee Choi and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
Though published many decades apart, these two texts share similarities both in their subject matter and their experimental qualities. Just as Dictee cannot be merely labeled as a memoir and
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,
Delve Readers Seminars Online Spring 2023
Little Things: A Study of Literary Compression
“It’s the little things that count”; “Good things come in small packages”; “Brevity is the soul of wit”; “The Devil’s in the details”… We’ll put these aphorisms to the test
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
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
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
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,
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
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
Delve Readers Seminars Online
Korean Science Fiction: Tower and I’m Waiting for You
Blending the novel and the short story format, Tower satirically examines modern life through six interconnected stories that all take place in a 674-story skyscraper. Bae Myung-hoon is one of
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
Delve Readers Seminars Fall 2023 Online
Zadie Smith: The Fraud
Zadie Smith is a critically acclaimed fiction writer, essayist, and playwright, whose work includes the novel White Teeth, winner of the Guardian First Book Prize, and On Beauty, winner of
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
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
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
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 Winter 2024
George Eliot: Daniel Deronda
Young and beautiful Gwendolen Harleth is poised at a roulette table at a German spa, where she is observed by Daniel Deronda, an exceptionally handsome upper-class Englishman. Later, a reversal
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 Winter 2024
Monsters and Morals: Art vs. the Artist
So the saying goes, “You should never meet your heroes.” The fact that this is such a common expression implies a longtime acceptance that the artist and the art they
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 Online Winter 2024
The Age of Doubt
A translated collection of short stories from one of Korea's most renowned writers, Pak Kyongni, Age of Doubt explores the postwar Korea of the 50s and 60s. A time of
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.
In-person Spring 2024 Delve Readers Seminars
Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary
Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is the quintessential modern novel. This is the paradigmatic “show don’t tell” writer who, by sheer force of talent, sweat, style, and restraint was able to turn a small, inconsequential notice in a provincial newspaper into one of the greatest stories of the Western tradition. Morally complex, ironic, insightful, and brilliant—if this
Delve Readers Seminars In-person Summer 2024
Willa Cather: A Lost Lady and My Mortal Enemy
Willa Cather (1873–1947) is one of the most beloved writers in the American canon and is one of those writers whose works are embraced both by a mass audience and by scholars within the academy. Over the course of the past 40 years Cather’s work has been claimed and fought over by such a variety
Delve Readers Seminars Summer 2024
Olivia Laing: The Garden Against Time
“The simplest answer is that a writer who gardens is sooner or later going to write a book about the subject–I take that as inevitable,” writes Eleanor Perenyi in her forward to Green Thoughts, her collection of essays on gardening. In this course, we’ll explore literature of the garden, using Olivia Laing’s book The Garden
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