Mon, Jul 25, 2016 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm PDT

Mondays, July 25– August 29, 2016 6:30–8:30 p.m. Beloved fictionalizes the true story of Margaret Garner, a fugitive, American bondwoman who committed infanticide rather than permit her children’s re-enslavement. Morrison’s version poignantly imagines relationships rent apart or forged by the denial of their participants’ humanity, and explores what it means to be unfree in a country ostensibly built on freedom. Our seminar will consider Beloved’s place in the American literary cannon––what it challenges, builds on, and establishes––and how to read…

Sun, Sep 1, 2019 from 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm PDT

This Delve will examine stories from different literary genres and periods that all uniquely address the topic of personal freedom in conflict with societal pressures and control over the individual. Our texts will include Margaret Atwood’s much anticipated sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and a selection of poems by various authors. Registration for this Delve includes a ticket to Margaret Atwood in Conversation with Omar…

Mon, January 6 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm PST

Where have the gonzo journalists gone? Who is proudly owning the biases of their bylines? What use to a readership is a novelist turning to journalism? Why do we invest trust in certain writers above others? How has social media changed authors’ abilities to construct personas? Zadie Smith and Hunter S. Thompson are an unlikely pairing. Their arrivals to world fame coming from London and Louisville respectively. Thompson wrote through the 60s to his death in 2005; Smith writes today.…

Wed, January 8 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm PST

This seminar is offered exclusively for people of color. Seminar participants will receive one complimentary admission to Literary Arts’ Portland Arts & Lectures event with Min Jin Lee on January 15. “We cannot help but be interested in the stories of people that history pushes aside so thoughtlessly.” ― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko Whether it’s the children of immigrants living in America or Korean immigrants in 20th century Japan, Min Jin Lee’s characters are people whose stories have not been…

Thu, January 9 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm PST

This Delve explores two pivotal examples of historical fiction in contemporary Turkish literature, Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi (2009) and Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red (2001). Shafak’s novel transports the reader to the golden age of the Anatolian city Konja, the capital of the Seljuk Sultanate in the mid 13th century. Among the many refugees who settled in this cultural crossroads was the family of Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi, the mystic poet and the…

Tue, January 14 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm PST

With the growing interest in speculative fiction, several writers have worked to deconstruct popular tropes to examine contemporary social issues. Octavia Butler’s modern classic, Kindred, is a science fiction novel that uses time travel to reposition the slave narrative as a speculative work.  The story begins when the main character, Dana, is transported to the antebellum South. There, the book creates a story that explores history and family legacies while deconstructing ideas of slavery. Octavia E. Butler is a multiple…

Wed, January 22 from 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm PST

In this six-week seminar, we will explore the works of award-winning contemporary writers Leslie Marmon Silko, Annie Proulx, and Claire Vaye Watkins and how they confront, disrupt, challenge, and complicate the dominant narrative of the West. Leslie Marmon Silko’s now classic novel Ceremony weaves desert landscape and tribal origin stories into a tale of a returning war veteran’s trauma and healing. In Close Range: The Wyoming Stories, the first of three short story collections unified by setting, Annie Proulx tells…

Mon, March 2 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm PST

Four-week Seminar This class will focus on Forster’s use of symbolism and allusion, lyrical figurative language, and his keen observations of British life in this early 20th century literary masterpiece.

Thu, April 16 from 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm PDT

Six-week Seminar: This Delve will explore museum galleries, pages of books, and the realm of memory, discovering commonalities in ways writers and visual artists recreate human experience through their hyper-realistic descriptions of material objects and natural places.

Tue, April 28 from 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm PDT

Two week online Delve seminar. Paula by Isabel Allende is a memoir that accepts the magical and spiritual worlds, and is vibrant with strange lands, bizarre ancestors and rich memories.

Wed, May 20 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm PDT

Six-week Seminar: This Delve will examine the essays of James Baldwin, the leading literary voice of the black freedom struggle.

Wed, August 5 from 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm PDT

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.

Sun, September 6 from 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm PDT

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.

Thu, September 10 from 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm PDT

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.

Wed, September 23 from 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm PDT

When exactly is “once upon a time,” what does it mean to live “happily ever after,” and how do these tropes from childhood storybooks find their way into so much contemporary literature and film? These traditional frames for fairytales are just one of the aspects we’ll study in this Delve; we will examine other aspects of structure, characters, and motifs of folktales, both in collected oral tales and literary retellings of those same tales over time, into the current day.…

Tue, October 6 from 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm PDT

What is the purpose of public life? Should we live as thinkers or doers? These are the questions that Hannah Arendt tackles in her 1958 work ​The Human Condition. Philosophers have long argued that the ideal state for the human condition is a life of contemplation and inward-focus. Arendt questions the value of the ​vita contemplativa​ and she proposes that a life of action, ​vita activa​, is central to the human condition. Hannah Arendt is one of the most influential…