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REGISTER FOR UPCOMING DELVE READERS’ SEMINARSDelve Readers' SeminarsJoin a guide and a group of readers to explore great works of literature.
Read below for brief seminar descriptions. Remember to enroll early; each seminar is limited to 16 participants. REGISTER FOR DISQUIETED DELVE ONLINE
We live in an age of disquiet, an age where our post-post-modern novelists pay tribute to culture, class, race, gender and conflict by channeling a cacophony of voices blasting through loud, lived-in cities. Zadie Smith takes on London in her breakthrough novel White Teeth. Colum McCann gives us pre-and-post-9/11 New York in his National Book Award-winning Let the Great World Spin. Through these arresting contemporary works we’ll address the disquiet; its challenges and affirmations. Guide: Sara Guest has degrees in literature from Miami University and Case Western Reserve. She is a poet, novelist, program coordinator for Write Around Portland, and William Stafford Writing Fellow. Read The Oregonian’s review of Disquieted THE FOLLOWING SEMINARS ARE SOLD OUT
What does the aristocracy do while the rest toil? Are positions in life predestined and static or do we have free will? While war wages and loved ones die each day, seemingly beyond our control, we will discuss why life continues to repeat the themes of Tolstoy’s masterpiece written in the 19th century. Guide: Susan McKee Reese is a poet and Assistant Professor in the English Department at Portland State University. SHORT STORIES AND SPIRITS Join fellow working readers at Cassidy’s Restaurant to imbibe short stories by four powerful writers from four different countries: David Foster Wallace, the American writer who died tragically in 2008; political activist, Arundhati Roy, Indian writer of The God of Small Things; Roberto Bolano, the Cuban novelist who wrote 2666; and Nadine Gordimer, a member of the African National Congress who labored to end South African apartheid. Delve into powerful prose over drinks before you head home. Guide: Barry Sanders is professor emeritus from Pitzer College, of the Claremont Colleges. He is the author of fourteen books and teaches at Pacific Northwest College of Art.
Lands discovered, monarchs deposed, blood spilled, love spoiled—so much is conquered in Shakespeare’s tragedies, which offer an intriguing reflection of power and politics at the turn from the 16th to 17th centuries. Examine how notions of empire resonate in Shakespeare’s greatest plays. Guide: Lois Leveen earned degrees in history and literature from Harvard, the University of Southern California, and UCLA. Her work has appeared most recently in the book Queer Portland and the journal Bridges.
Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass celebrated American character by inventing a new American poetics, stirring and shocking mid-nineteenth-century readers with its frank representations of gender, race, and sexuality. Explore how Whitman’s daring themes echo in poetry and fiction by writers as varied as Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, and Maxine Hong Kingston, as they set out to capture the modern American experience. Guide: Lois Leveen earned degrees in history and literature from Harvard, the University of Southern California, and UCLA. Her work has appeared most recently in the book Queer Portland and the journal Bridges.
So much more than a madman tilting at windmills with his loyal sidekick, Cervantes’s 17th Century Don Quixote is parody, comedy and romance. Examine the complexity of morality and investigate the death of chivalry in this poetic novel. Guide: Susan McKee Reese is a poet and Assistant Professor in the English Department at Portland State University.
In this seminar, we’ll explore the late David Foster Wallace’s huge, sprawling, complicated novel, Infinite Jest. Published in 1996, Infinite Jest offers a parodic vision of a post-modern North America in persistently creative and often dazzling prose. Noted for its technical virtuosity and ceaseless erudition, at its core Infinite Jest is a deeply humane, unforgettable exploration of our disordered culture—one of the books that matter. Guide: Christopher Zinn is a scholar of American literature and culture. He teaches humanities at the Portland Waldorf High School.
Twice a Pulitzer Prize recipient, Wilson is an important chronicler of the African-American experience and is one of America’s most celebrated playwrights. We will delve into six plays from what is known as his American Cycle, including the masterpiece, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. Guide: Mead Hunter taught theater history and dramatic literature at UCLA, UCSD, and CalArts. He holds an MFA in Dramaturgy from Yale and a PhD in Critical Studies from UCLA. |
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