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UID:10007001-1637260200-1637265600@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:The Essential Political Writings of Hubert Harrison
DESCRIPTION:Selections from A Hubert Harrison Reader\nReading and discussion with the The Revolutions Study Group \nRecognized by the contemporaries of his days as the leading orator\, editor\, thinker\,  organizer and writer in the Black Mecca of Harlem for over 10 years before his premature death at the age of 44\, Harrison’s  articles on socialism\, Black self-determination\, Africa\, Asia and the Caribbean\, US History\, class first vs race first discussion\, WWI\, imperialism and internationalism were read around the world and are as relevant today as they were a century ago. \nJeffrey B Perry author of the 2 volume biography of Hubert Harrison (Columbia University Press) and editor of A Hubert Harrison Reader(Wesleyan University Press) describes Harrison “as the most class conscious of the race radicals and the most race conscious of the class radicals in those years” adding that he is “a key link in the two great trends of the Civil Rights/Black Liberation struggle—the labor and civil rights trend associated associated with A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King\, Jr. and the race and nationalist trend associated with Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X.” \nTHE REVOLUTIONS STUDY GROUP (started at the Brecht Forum) has met since 2009.We also meet on Tuesday nights where we study Theodore Allen’s The Invention of the White Race.     \nThere is a special offer to be part of this reading group and the Tuesday reading group for a combined price of $100.     \n\nAll events are sliding scale—choose the level at which you choose to contribute to The Marxist Education Project. No one is denied admission to any event or class because of an inability to pay. Send an email to info@marxedproject.org to obtain an entry url to any event or class presented by The Marxist Education Project.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/the-essential-political-writings-of-hubert-harrison/2021-11-18/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:African American History,American Literature,Capital Studies,Class and Gender,Classes/Events,Emancipation,Immigration,Indigenous Peoples,Labor Process,Migration,Race and Class,Revolutions Study Group,Seminars and Talks
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/PanoramicHarrison.jpg
ORGANIZER;CN="The Revolutions Study Group":MAILTO:info@marxedproject.org
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20211111T183000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20211111T200000
DTSTAMP:20211030T030527Z
CREATED:20210822T145641Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20211030T030527Z
UID:10007000-1636655400-1636660800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:The Essential Political Writings of Hubert Harrison
DESCRIPTION:Selections from A Hubert Harrison Reader\nReading and discussion with the The Revolutions Study Group \nRecognized by the contemporaries of his days as the leading orator\, editor\, thinker\,  organizer and writer in the Black Mecca of Harlem for over 10 years before his premature death at the age of 44\, Harrison’s  articles on socialism\, Black self-determination\, Africa\, Asia and the Caribbean\, US History\, class first vs race first discussion\, WWI\, imperialism and internationalism were read around the world and are as relevant today as they were a century ago. \nJeffrey B Perry author of the 2 volume biography of Hubert Harrison (Columbia University Press) and editor of A Hubert Harrison Reader(Wesleyan University Press) describes Harrison “as the most class conscious of the race radicals and the most race conscious of the class radicals in those years” adding that he is “a key link in the two great trends of the Civil Rights/Black Liberation struggle—the labor and civil rights trend associated associated with A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King\, Jr. and the race and nationalist trend associated with Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X.” \nTHE REVOLUTIONS STUDY GROUP (started at the Brecht Forum) has met since 2009.We also meet on Tuesday nights where we study Theodore Allen’s The Invention of the White Race.     \nThere is a special offer to be part of this reading group and the Tuesday reading group for a combined price of $100.     \n\nAll events are sliding scale—choose the level at which you choose to contribute to The Marxist Education Project. No one is denied admission to any event or class because of an inability to pay. Send an email to info@marxedproject.org to obtain an entry url to any event or class presented by The Marxist Education Project.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/the-essential-political-writings-of-hubert-harrison/2021-11-11/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:African American History,American Literature,Capital Studies,Class and Gender,Classes/Events,Emancipation,Immigration,Indigenous Peoples,Labor Process,Migration,Race and Class,Revolutions Study Group,Seminars and Talks
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/PanoramicHarrison.jpg
ORGANIZER;CN="The Revolutions Study Group":MAILTO:info@marxedproject.org
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20211104T183000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20211104T200000
DTSTAMP:20211030T030527Z
CREATED:20210822T145641Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20211030T030527Z
UID:10006999-1636050600-1636056000@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:The Essential Political Writings of Hubert Harrison
DESCRIPTION:Selections from A Hubert Harrison Reader\nReading and discussion with the The Revolutions Study Group \nRecognized by the contemporaries of his days as the leading orator\, editor\, thinker\,  organizer and writer in the Black Mecca of Harlem for over 10 years before his premature death at the age of 44\, Harrison’s  articles on socialism\, Black self-determination\, Africa\, Asia and the Caribbean\, US History\, class first vs race first discussion\, WWI\, imperialism and internationalism were read around the world and are as relevant today as they were a century ago. \nJeffrey B Perry author of the 2 volume biography of Hubert Harrison (Columbia University Press) and editor of A Hubert Harrison Reader(Wesleyan University Press) describes Harrison “as the most class conscious of the race radicals and the most race conscious of the class radicals in those years” adding that he is “a key link in the two great trends of the Civil Rights/Black Liberation struggle—the labor and civil rights trend associated associated with A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King\, Jr. and the race and nationalist trend associated with Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X.” \nTHE REVOLUTIONS STUDY GROUP (started at the Brecht Forum) has met since 2009.We also meet on Tuesday nights where we study Theodore Allen’s The Invention of the White Race.     \nThere is a special offer to be part of this reading group and the Tuesday reading group for a combined price of $100.     \n\nAll events are sliding scale—choose the level at which you choose to contribute to The Marxist Education Project. No one is denied admission to any event or class because of an inability to pay. Send an email to info@marxedproject.org to obtain an entry url to any event or class presented by The Marxist Education Project.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/the-essential-political-writings-of-hubert-harrison/2021-11-04/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:African American History,American Literature,Capital Studies,Class and Gender,Classes/Events,Emancipation,Immigration,Indigenous Peoples,Labor Process,Migration,Race and Class,Revolutions Study Group,Seminars and Talks
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/PanoramicHarrison.jpg
ORGANIZER;CN="The Revolutions Study Group":MAILTO:info@marxedproject.org
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20210909T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20210909T210000
DTSTAMP:20210904T213943Z
CREATED:20210520T055647Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210904T213943Z
UID:10006948-1631214000-1631221200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Fifth Summer of Noir: Last session this week (Derek Raymond and Denise Mina)
DESCRIPTION:with The Marxist Education Project Literature Studies Group\n“As Georges Bataille tells us\, there is a profound link between literature and evil. If writing and reading are transgressive acts\, or crimes\, which unmask deep philosophical truths about us and our world\, then what does crime fiction — a genre focused on those transgressions — reveal? Scholars from Dennis Porter to Ernest Mandel argue that the crime genre is also distinctly social\, even political\, and revealing about mainstream ideology\, power\, and control.”           —Russell Williams\, “The Serie Noire and Social Intervention”\, LA Review of Books\, July 27\, 2015 \nFor the last four summers\, the MEP Literature Studies Group has delved into a wealth of noir fiction. This year our six selections will take us deep into the underbelly of capitalism – good for reading at the beach\, on the subway\, a train\, boat or plane\, or in your favorite reading chair safely at home. \nWe have completed our discussions of Drive\, Clark Gifford’s Body\, Dread Journey\, Black Wings Has My Angel and How the Dead Live. \n \nSEPTEMBER 9 • THE LESS DEAD by DENISE MINA\nA story of daughters and mothers\, secrets and choices\, and how the search for the truth—and a long-hidden killer—will lead one woman to find herself. 336 pages \nDenise Mina is a Scottish crime writer and playwright. She has written the Garnethill trilogy and another three novels featuring the character Patricia “Paddy” Meehan\, a Glasgow journalist. Described as an author of Tartan Noir\, she has also dabbled in comic book writing\, having written 13 issues of Hellblazer. \n  \n 
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/pandemic-summer-noir/2021-09-09/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:American Literature,Class,Class and Gender,Classes/Events,Emancipation,Literary Studies,Marxist Method,Modernity,Multi-session Classes,Noir Fiction,Radical Literature,Speculative fiction
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/SummerNoirStopsign2.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20210902T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20210902T210000
DTSTAMP:20210904T213943Z
CREATED:20210520T055647Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210904T213943Z
UID:10006947-1630609200-1630616400@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Fifth Summer of Noir: Last session this week (Derek Raymond and Denise Mina)
DESCRIPTION:with The Marxist Education Project Literature Studies Group\n“As Georges Bataille tells us\, there is a profound link between literature and evil. If writing and reading are transgressive acts\, or crimes\, which unmask deep philosophical truths about us and our world\, then what does crime fiction — a genre focused on those transgressions — reveal? Scholars from Dennis Porter to Ernest Mandel argue that the crime genre is also distinctly social\, even political\, and revealing about mainstream ideology\, power\, and control.”           —Russell Williams\, “The Serie Noire and Social Intervention”\, LA Review of Books\, July 27\, 2015 \nFor the last four summers\, the MEP Literature Studies Group has delved into a wealth of noir fiction. This year our six selections will take us deep into the underbelly of capitalism – good for reading at the beach\, on the subway\, a train\, boat or plane\, or in your favorite reading chair safely at home. \nWe have completed our discussions of Drive\, Clark Gifford’s Body\, Dread Journey\, Black Wings Has My Angel and How the Dead Live. \n \nSEPTEMBER 9 • THE LESS DEAD by DENISE MINA\nA story of daughters and mothers\, secrets and choices\, and how the search for the truth—and a long-hidden killer—will lead one woman to find herself. 336 pages \nDenise Mina is a Scottish crime writer and playwright. She has written the Garnethill trilogy and another three novels featuring the character Patricia “Paddy” Meehan\, a Glasgow journalist. Described as an author of Tartan Noir\, she has also dabbled in comic book writing\, having written 13 issues of Hellblazer. \n  \n 
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/pandemic-summer-noir/2021-09-02/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:American Literature,Class,Class and Gender,Classes/Events,Emancipation,Literary Studies,Marxist Method,Modernity,Multi-session Classes,Noir Fiction,Radical Literature,Speculative fiction
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/SummerNoirStopsign2.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20210826T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20210826T210000
DTSTAMP:20210904T213943Z
CREATED:20210520T055647Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210904T213943Z
UID:10006946-1630004400-1630011600@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Fifth Summer of Noir: Last session this week (Derek Raymond and Denise Mina)
DESCRIPTION:with The Marxist Education Project Literature Studies Group\n“As Georges Bataille tells us\, there is a profound link between literature and evil. If writing and reading are transgressive acts\, or crimes\, which unmask deep philosophical truths about us and our world\, then what does crime fiction — a genre focused on those transgressions — reveal? Scholars from Dennis Porter to Ernest Mandel argue that the crime genre is also distinctly social\, even political\, and revealing about mainstream ideology\, power\, and control.”           —Russell Williams\, “The Serie Noire and Social Intervention”\, LA Review of Books\, July 27\, 2015 \nFor the last four summers\, the MEP Literature Studies Group has delved into a wealth of noir fiction. This year our six selections will take us deep into the underbelly of capitalism – good for reading at the beach\, on the subway\, a train\, boat or plane\, or in your favorite reading chair safely at home. \nWe have completed our discussions of Drive\, Clark Gifford’s Body\, Dread Journey\, Black Wings Has My Angel and How the Dead Live. \n \nSEPTEMBER 9 • THE LESS DEAD by DENISE MINA\nA story of daughters and mothers\, secrets and choices\, and how the search for the truth—and a long-hidden killer—will lead one woman to find herself. 336 pages \nDenise Mina is a Scottish crime writer and playwright. She has written the Garnethill trilogy and another three novels featuring the character Patricia “Paddy” Meehan\, a Glasgow journalist. Described as an author of Tartan Noir\, she has also dabbled in comic book writing\, having written 13 issues of Hellblazer. \n  \n 
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/pandemic-summer-noir/2021-08-26/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:American Literature,Class,Class and Gender,Classes/Events,Emancipation,Literary Studies,Marxist Method,Modernity,Multi-session Classes,Noir Fiction,Radical Literature,Speculative fiction
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/SummerNoirStopsign2.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20210819T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20210819T210000
DTSTAMP:20210904T213943Z
CREATED:20210520T055647Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210904T213943Z
UID:10006945-1629399600-1629406800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Fifth Summer of Noir: Last session this week (Derek Raymond and Denise Mina)
DESCRIPTION:with The Marxist Education Project Literature Studies Group\n“As Georges Bataille tells us\, there is a profound link between literature and evil. If writing and reading are transgressive acts\, or crimes\, which unmask deep philosophical truths about us and our world\, then what does crime fiction — a genre focused on those transgressions — reveal? Scholars from Dennis Porter to Ernest Mandel argue that the crime genre is also distinctly social\, even political\, and revealing about mainstream ideology\, power\, and control.”           —Russell Williams\, “The Serie Noire and Social Intervention”\, LA Review of Books\, July 27\, 2015 \nFor the last four summers\, the MEP Literature Studies Group has delved into a wealth of noir fiction. This year our six selections will take us deep into the underbelly of capitalism – good for reading at the beach\, on the subway\, a train\, boat or plane\, or in your favorite reading chair safely at home. \nWe have completed our discussions of Drive\, Clark Gifford’s Body\, Dread Journey\, Black Wings Has My Angel and How the Dead Live. \n \nSEPTEMBER 9 • THE LESS DEAD by DENISE MINA\nA story of daughters and mothers\, secrets and choices\, and how the search for the truth—and a long-hidden killer—will lead one woman to find herself. 336 pages \nDenise Mina is a Scottish crime writer and playwright. She has written the Garnethill trilogy and another three novels featuring the character Patricia “Paddy” Meehan\, a Glasgow journalist. Described as an author of Tartan Noir\, she has also dabbled in comic book writing\, having written 13 issues of Hellblazer. \n  \n 
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/pandemic-summer-noir/2021-08-19/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:American Literature,Class,Class and Gender,Classes/Events,Emancipation,Literary Studies,Marxist Method,Modernity,Multi-session Classes,Noir Fiction,Radical Literature,Speculative fiction
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/SummerNoirStopsign2.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20210622T183000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20210622T200000
DTSTAMP:20210614T174728Z
CREATED:20200919T150959Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210614T174728Z
UID:10006144-1624386600-1624392000@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois
DESCRIPTION:with Sean Ahern\n2 more sessions through June 22\nOn February 23\, 1968\, Martin Luther King\, speaking in honor of W. E. B. Du Bois\, had this to say about Black Reconstruction: \n“…Black Reconstruction was six years in writing but was 33 years in preparation…To understand why his study of the Reconstruction was a monumental achievement it is necessary to see it in context. White historians had for a century crudely distorted the Negro’s role in the Reconstruction years. It was a conscious and deliberate manipulation of history\, and the stakes were high…. Dr. Du Bois confronted this powerful structure of historical distortion and dismantled it. He virtually\, before anyone else and more than anyone else\, demolished the lies about Negroes in their most important and creative period of history. The truths he revealed are not yet the property of all Americans but they have been recorded and arm us for our contemporary battles.” \nBlack Reconstruction provides a basis for a much overdue revolution in US labor history. As Du Bois so eloquently and bluntly put in in 1935: “The South\, after the war\, presented the greatest opportunity for a real national labor movement which the nation ever saw or is likely to see again for many decades. Yet\, the labor movement\, with but few exceptions\, never realized the situation. It never had the intelligence or knowledge\, as a whole\, to see in black slavery and Reconstruction\, the kernel and meaning of the labor movement in the United States.” (p.353) \nThese sessions will continue through to June 22. The suggested sliding scale fees are being reduced by 20-25%. \nSEAN AHERN is a long-time New York City labor activist and anti-racist fighter. He has worked as a labor organizer in the USPS\, the transit industry and jn education. \nNo one turned away for inability to pay. Please write to info@marxedproject.org for the links to join this group.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/black-reconstruction-in-america-by-w-e-b-du-bois/2021-06-22/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:African American History,American Literature,Classes/Events,Marxist Method,Political Economy,Race and Class
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/tiff:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/DuboisDrawing.tif
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20210617T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20210617T210000
DTSTAMP:20210503T002134Z
CREATED:20210313T044932Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210503T002134Z
UID:10006901-1623956400-1623963600@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Matters of State: Literature & Espionage
DESCRIPTION:The MEP Literature Reading Group takes on three more spy novels\n \nWhy Spy Novels? \nSpy novels emerged as a distinct genre around the time of World War I\, coinciding with the creation of formal intelligence agencies in many countries. This was a period characterized by heightened concern on the part of rulers about national security\, imperial strength\, and the impending conflict of the Great War. Spy novels from the early twentieth century reflect these concerns\, and generally feature secret agents and seemingly realistic tales of international intrigue. With the rise of fascism\, spy novels shifted their focus to examine the dynamics of political movements within individual states\, assessing their threats to the stability of the international political order. In these stories\, the anxiety over the powerlessness of the individual is assuaged by the resourcefulness and ultimate success of exceptional or lucky individuals in confronting such harrowing problems as war\, nuclear proliferation\, and terrorism. The verisimilitude of spy novels written in the twentieth century is an integral part of the genre’s popularity; the genre often reflects political\, economic\, and cultural anxieties as well as showcasing advances in surveillance technology. You will see reference to The Human Factor by Graham Greene below. The group has read and discussed this novel during April. \nTHE HUMAN FACTOR (1978) • GRAHAM GREENE Greene aimed with this book to write a novel of espionage free from the violence that is more typical of the genre. Another theme Greene explored was  Western capital’s hypocritical relations with South Africa under apartheid. He thought that even though some Western capitalists would often publicly oppose apartheid\, those same holders of capital “simply could not let South Africa succumb to black power and (or) communism.” \nA MAP OF BETRAYAL (2014) • HA JIN The protagonists of this novel occupy the “treacherous territory” of margins. Jin’s master spy is no 007 or George Smiley. What distinguishes Gary is his ordinariness\, “his simple\, casual fashion of conducting espionage.” A spare\, haunting tale of conflicted loyalties that spans half a century in the entwined histories of two countries—China and the United States—and two families as it explores the complicated terrain of love and honor. \nTHE SYMPATHIZER (2015) • VIET THANH NGUYEN The anonymous narrator has an “acrobatic ability” that guides the reader through the contradictions of the Vietnam War and American identity. Set as a flashback in the coerced confession of a double agent\, the book’s half-Vietnamese\, half-French narrator recounts the fall of the US-allied South Vietnamese Government in 1975 and subsequent events as its top officials flee to American exile in Los Angeles. \nAMERICAN SPY (2018) • LAUREN WILKINSON It’s 1986\, the tail end of the Cold War\, and Marie Mitchell has been tasked by the FBI with undermining Thomas Sankara\, the revolutionary president of Burkina Faso whose communism has made him an American intervention target. The CIA wants Marie to ascertain how much Sankara knows about America’s involvement in his opposition\, and possibly seduce him — Marie has misgivings\, doubting the CIA’s motives\, but accepts the job anyway. She doesn’t expect\, however\, to be won over by the revolutionary politician: “The way he could make you feel. It was like he saw a version of you that was even more perfect than the version you saw of yourself.” \n  \n 
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/matters-of-state-literature-espionage/2021-06-17/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:American Literature,China,Classes/Events,Emancipation,Literary Studies,Marxist Method,Radical Literature
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/LockNKey.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20210615T183000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20210615T200000
DTSTAMP:20210614T174728Z
CREATED:20200919T150959Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210614T174728Z
UID:10006143-1623781800-1623787200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois
DESCRIPTION:with Sean Ahern\n2 more sessions through June 22\nOn February 23\, 1968\, Martin Luther King\, speaking in honor of W. E. B. Du Bois\, had this to say about Black Reconstruction: \n“…Black Reconstruction was six years in writing but was 33 years in preparation…To understand why his study of the Reconstruction was a monumental achievement it is necessary to see it in context. White historians had for a century crudely distorted the Negro’s role in the Reconstruction years. It was a conscious and deliberate manipulation of history\, and the stakes were high…. Dr. Du Bois confronted this powerful structure of historical distortion and dismantled it. He virtually\, before anyone else and more than anyone else\, demolished the lies about Negroes in their most important and creative period of history. The truths he revealed are not yet the property of all Americans but they have been recorded and arm us for our contemporary battles.” \nBlack Reconstruction provides a basis for a much overdue revolution in US labor history. As Du Bois so eloquently and bluntly put in in 1935: “The South\, after the war\, presented the greatest opportunity for a real national labor movement which the nation ever saw or is likely to see again for many decades. Yet\, the labor movement\, with but few exceptions\, never realized the situation. It never had the intelligence or knowledge\, as a whole\, to see in black slavery and Reconstruction\, the kernel and meaning of the labor movement in the United States.” (p.353) \nThese sessions will continue through to June 22. The suggested sliding scale fees are being reduced by 20-25%. \nSEAN AHERN is a long-time New York City labor activist and anti-racist fighter. He has worked as a labor organizer in the USPS\, the transit industry and jn education. \nNo one turned away for inability to pay. Please write to info@marxedproject.org for the links to join this group.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/black-reconstruction-in-america-by-w-e-b-du-bois/2021-06-15/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:African American History,American Literature,Classes/Events,Marxist Method,Political Economy,Race and Class
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/tiff:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/DuboisDrawing.tif
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20210614T183000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20210614T200000
DTSTAMP:20210614T174728Z
CREATED:20200919T150959Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210614T174728Z
UID:10006142-1623695400-1623700800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois
DESCRIPTION:with Sean Ahern\n2 more sessions through June 22\nOn February 23\, 1968\, Martin Luther King\, speaking in honor of W. E. B. Du Bois\, had this to say about Black Reconstruction: \n“…Black Reconstruction was six years in writing but was 33 years in preparation…To understand why his study of the Reconstruction was a monumental achievement it is necessary to see it in context. White historians had for a century crudely distorted the Negro’s role in the Reconstruction years. It was a conscious and deliberate manipulation of history\, and the stakes were high…. Dr. Du Bois confronted this powerful structure of historical distortion and dismantled it. He virtually\, before anyone else and more than anyone else\, demolished the lies about Negroes in their most important and creative period of history. The truths he revealed are not yet the property of all Americans but they have been recorded and arm us for our contemporary battles.” \nBlack Reconstruction provides a basis for a much overdue revolution in US labor history. As Du Bois so eloquently and bluntly put in in 1935: “The South\, after the war\, presented the greatest opportunity for a real national labor movement which the nation ever saw or is likely to see again for many decades. Yet\, the labor movement\, with but few exceptions\, never realized the situation. It never had the intelligence or knowledge\, as a whole\, to see in black slavery and Reconstruction\, the kernel and meaning of the labor movement in the United States.” (p.353) \nThese sessions will continue through to June 22. The suggested sliding scale fees are being reduced by 20-25%. \nSEAN AHERN is a long-time New York City labor activist and anti-racist fighter. He has worked as a labor organizer in the USPS\, the transit industry and jn education. \nNo one turned away for inability to pay. Please write to info@marxedproject.org for the links to join this group.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/black-reconstruction-in-america-by-w-e-b-du-bois/2021-06-14/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:African American History,American Literature,Classes/Events,Marxist Method,Political Economy,Race and Class
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/tiff:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/DuboisDrawing.tif
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20210610T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20210610T210000
DTSTAMP:20210503T002134Z
CREATED:20210313T044932Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210503T002134Z
UID:10006900-1623351600-1623358800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Matters of State: Literature & Espionage
DESCRIPTION:The MEP Literature Reading Group takes on three more spy novels\n \nWhy Spy Novels? \nSpy novels emerged as a distinct genre around the time of World War I\, coinciding with the creation of formal intelligence agencies in many countries. This was a period characterized by heightened concern on the part of rulers about national security\, imperial strength\, and the impending conflict of the Great War. Spy novels from the early twentieth century reflect these concerns\, and generally feature secret agents and seemingly realistic tales of international intrigue. With the rise of fascism\, spy novels shifted their focus to examine the dynamics of political movements within individual states\, assessing their threats to the stability of the international political order. In these stories\, the anxiety over the powerlessness of the individual is assuaged by the resourcefulness and ultimate success of exceptional or lucky individuals in confronting such harrowing problems as war\, nuclear proliferation\, and terrorism. The verisimilitude of spy novels written in the twentieth century is an integral part of the genre’s popularity; the genre often reflects political\, economic\, and cultural anxieties as well as showcasing advances in surveillance technology. You will see reference to The Human Factor by Graham Greene below. The group has read and discussed this novel during April. \nTHE HUMAN FACTOR (1978) • GRAHAM GREENE Greene aimed with this book to write a novel of espionage free from the violence that is more typical of the genre. Another theme Greene explored was  Western capital’s hypocritical relations with South Africa under apartheid. He thought that even though some Western capitalists would often publicly oppose apartheid\, those same holders of capital “simply could not let South Africa succumb to black power and (or) communism.” \nA MAP OF BETRAYAL (2014) • HA JIN The protagonists of this novel occupy the “treacherous territory” of margins. Jin’s master spy is no 007 or George Smiley. What distinguishes Gary is his ordinariness\, “his simple\, casual fashion of conducting espionage.” A spare\, haunting tale of conflicted loyalties that spans half a century in the entwined histories of two countries—China and the United States—and two families as it explores the complicated terrain of love and honor. \nTHE SYMPATHIZER (2015) • VIET THANH NGUYEN The anonymous narrator has an “acrobatic ability” that guides the reader through the contradictions of the Vietnam War and American identity. Set as a flashback in the coerced confession of a double agent\, the book’s half-Vietnamese\, half-French narrator recounts the fall of the US-allied South Vietnamese Government in 1975 and subsequent events as its top officials flee to American exile in Los Angeles. \nAMERICAN SPY (2018) • LAUREN WILKINSON It’s 1986\, the tail end of the Cold War\, and Marie Mitchell has been tasked by the FBI with undermining Thomas Sankara\, the revolutionary president of Burkina Faso whose communism has made him an American intervention target. The CIA wants Marie to ascertain how much Sankara knows about America’s involvement in his opposition\, and possibly seduce him — Marie has misgivings\, doubting the CIA’s motives\, but accepts the job anyway. She doesn’t expect\, however\, to be won over by the revolutionary politician: “The way he could make you feel. It was like he saw a version of you that was even more perfect than the version you saw of yourself.” \n  \n 
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/matters-of-state-literature-espionage/2021-06-10/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:American Literature,China,Classes/Events,Emancipation,Literary Studies,Marxist Method,Radical Literature
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/LockNKey.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20210603T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20210603T210000
DTSTAMP:20210503T002134Z
CREATED:20210313T044932Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210503T002134Z
UID:10006899-1622746800-1622754000@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Matters of State: Literature & Espionage
DESCRIPTION:The MEP Literature Reading Group takes on three more spy novels\n \nWhy Spy Novels? \nSpy novels emerged as a distinct genre around the time of World War I\, coinciding with the creation of formal intelligence agencies in many countries. This was a period characterized by heightened concern on the part of rulers about national security\, imperial strength\, and the impending conflict of the Great War. Spy novels from the early twentieth century reflect these concerns\, and generally feature secret agents and seemingly realistic tales of international intrigue. With the rise of fascism\, spy novels shifted their focus to examine the dynamics of political movements within individual states\, assessing their threats to the stability of the international political order. In these stories\, the anxiety over the powerlessness of the individual is assuaged by the resourcefulness and ultimate success of exceptional or lucky individuals in confronting such harrowing problems as war\, nuclear proliferation\, and terrorism. The verisimilitude of spy novels written in the twentieth century is an integral part of the genre’s popularity; the genre often reflects political\, economic\, and cultural anxieties as well as showcasing advances in surveillance technology. You will see reference to The Human Factor by Graham Greene below. The group has read and discussed this novel during April. \nTHE HUMAN FACTOR (1978) • GRAHAM GREENE Greene aimed with this book to write a novel of espionage free from the violence that is more typical of the genre. Another theme Greene explored was  Western capital’s hypocritical relations with South Africa under apartheid. He thought that even though some Western capitalists would often publicly oppose apartheid\, those same holders of capital “simply could not let South Africa succumb to black power and (or) communism.” \nA MAP OF BETRAYAL (2014) • HA JIN The protagonists of this novel occupy the “treacherous territory” of margins. Jin’s master spy is no 007 or George Smiley. What distinguishes Gary is his ordinariness\, “his simple\, casual fashion of conducting espionage.” A spare\, haunting tale of conflicted loyalties that spans half a century in the entwined histories of two countries—China and the United States—and two families as it explores the complicated terrain of love and honor. \nTHE SYMPATHIZER (2015) • VIET THANH NGUYEN The anonymous narrator has an “acrobatic ability” that guides the reader through the contradictions of the Vietnam War and American identity. Set as a flashback in the coerced confession of a double agent\, the book’s half-Vietnamese\, half-French narrator recounts the fall of the US-allied South Vietnamese Government in 1975 and subsequent events as its top officials flee to American exile in Los Angeles. \nAMERICAN SPY (2018) • LAUREN WILKINSON It’s 1986\, the tail end of the Cold War\, and Marie Mitchell has been tasked by the FBI with undermining Thomas Sankara\, the revolutionary president of Burkina Faso whose communism has made him an American intervention target. The CIA wants Marie to ascertain how much Sankara knows about America’s involvement in his opposition\, and possibly seduce him — Marie has misgivings\, doubting the CIA’s motives\, but accepts the job anyway. She doesn’t expect\, however\, to be won over by the revolutionary politician: “The way he could make you feel. It was like he saw a version of you that was even more perfect than the version you saw of yourself.” \n  \n 
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/matters-of-state-literature-espionage/2021-06-03/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:American Literature,China,Classes/Events,Emancipation,Literary Studies,Marxist Method,Radical Literature
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/LockNKey.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20210527T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20210527T210000
DTSTAMP:20210503T002134Z
CREATED:20210313T044932Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210503T002134Z
UID:10006898-1622142000-1622149200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Matters of State: Literature & Espionage
DESCRIPTION:The MEP Literature Reading Group takes on three more spy novels\n \nWhy Spy Novels? \nSpy novels emerged as a distinct genre around the time of World War I\, coinciding with the creation of formal intelligence agencies in many countries. This was a period characterized by heightened concern on the part of rulers about national security\, imperial strength\, and the impending conflict of the Great War. Spy novels from the early twentieth century reflect these concerns\, and generally feature secret agents and seemingly realistic tales of international intrigue. With the rise of fascism\, spy novels shifted their focus to examine the dynamics of political movements within individual states\, assessing their threats to the stability of the international political order. In these stories\, the anxiety over the powerlessness of the individual is assuaged by the resourcefulness and ultimate success of exceptional or lucky individuals in confronting such harrowing problems as war\, nuclear proliferation\, and terrorism. The verisimilitude of spy novels written in the twentieth century is an integral part of the genre’s popularity; the genre often reflects political\, economic\, and cultural anxieties as well as showcasing advances in surveillance technology. You will see reference to The Human Factor by Graham Greene below. The group has read and discussed this novel during April. \nTHE HUMAN FACTOR (1978) • GRAHAM GREENE Greene aimed with this book to write a novel of espionage free from the violence that is more typical of the genre. Another theme Greene explored was  Western capital’s hypocritical relations with South Africa under apartheid. He thought that even though some Western capitalists would often publicly oppose apartheid\, those same holders of capital “simply could not let South Africa succumb to black power and (or) communism.” \nA MAP OF BETRAYAL (2014) • HA JIN The protagonists of this novel occupy the “treacherous territory” of margins. Jin’s master spy is no 007 or George Smiley. What distinguishes Gary is his ordinariness\, “his simple\, casual fashion of conducting espionage.” A spare\, haunting tale of conflicted loyalties that spans half a century in the entwined histories of two countries—China and the United States—and two families as it explores the complicated terrain of love and honor. \nTHE SYMPATHIZER (2015) • VIET THANH NGUYEN The anonymous narrator has an “acrobatic ability” that guides the reader through the contradictions of the Vietnam War and American identity. Set as a flashback in the coerced confession of a double agent\, the book’s half-Vietnamese\, half-French narrator recounts the fall of the US-allied South Vietnamese Government in 1975 and subsequent events as its top officials flee to American exile in Los Angeles. \nAMERICAN SPY (2018) • LAUREN WILKINSON It’s 1986\, the tail end of the Cold War\, and Marie Mitchell has been tasked by the FBI with undermining Thomas Sankara\, the revolutionary president of Burkina Faso whose communism has made him an American intervention target. The CIA wants Marie to ascertain how much Sankara knows about America’s involvement in his opposition\, and possibly seduce him — Marie has misgivings\, doubting the CIA’s motives\, but accepts the job anyway. She doesn’t expect\, however\, to be won over by the revolutionary politician: “The way he could make you feel. It was like he saw a version of you that was even more perfect than the version you saw of yourself.” \n  \n 
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/matters-of-state-literature-espionage/2021-05-27/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:American Literature,China,Classes/Events,Emancipation,Literary Studies,Marxist Method,Radical Literature
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/LockNKey.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20210520T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20210520T210000
DTSTAMP:20210503T002134Z
CREATED:20210313T044932Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210503T002134Z
UID:10006897-1621537200-1621544400@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Matters of State: Literature & Espionage
DESCRIPTION:The MEP Literature Reading Group takes on three more spy novels\n \nWhy Spy Novels? \nSpy novels emerged as a distinct genre around the time of World War I\, coinciding with the creation of formal intelligence agencies in many countries. This was a period characterized by heightened concern on the part of rulers about national security\, imperial strength\, and the impending conflict of the Great War. Spy novels from the early twentieth century reflect these concerns\, and generally feature secret agents and seemingly realistic tales of international intrigue. With the rise of fascism\, spy novels shifted their focus to examine the dynamics of political movements within individual states\, assessing their threats to the stability of the international political order. In these stories\, the anxiety over the powerlessness of the individual is assuaged by the resourcefulness and ultimate success of exceptional or lucky individuals in confronting such harrowing problems as war\, nuclear proliferation\, and terrorism. The verisimilitude of spy novels written in the twentieth century is an integral part of the genre’s popularity; the genre often reflects political\, economic\, and cultural anxieties as well as showcasing advances in surveillance technology. You will see reference to The Human Factor by Graham Greene below. The group has read and discussed this novel during April. \nTHE HUMAN FACTOR (1978) • GRAHAM GREENE Greene aimed with this book to write a novel of espionage free from the violence that is more typical of the genre. Another theme Greene explored was  Western capital’s hypocritical relations with South Africa under apartheid. He thought that even though some Western capitalists would often publicly oppose apartheid\, those same holders of capital “simply could not let South Africa succumb to black power and (or) communism.” \nA MAP OF BETRAYAL (2014) • HA JIN The protagonists of this novel occupy the “treacherous territory” of margins. Jin’s master spy is no 007 or George Smiley. What distinguishes Gary is his ordinariness\, “his simple\, casual fashion of conducting espionage.” A spare\, haunting tale of conflicted loyalties that spans half a century in the entwined histories of two countries—China and the United States—and two families as it explores the complicated terrain of love and honor. \nTHE SYMPATHIZER (2015) • VIET THANH NGUYEN The anonymous narrator has an “acrobatic ability” that guides the reader through the contradictions of the Vietnam War and American identity. Set as a flashback in the coerced confession of a double agent\, the book’s half-Vietnamese\, half-French narrator recounts the fall of the US-allied South Vietnamese Government in 1975 and subsequent events as its top officials flee to American exile in Los Angeles. \nAMERICAN SPY (2018) • LAUREN WILKINSON It’s 1986\, the tail end of the Cold War\, and Marie Mitchell has been tasked by the FBI with undermining Thomas Sankara\, the revolutionary president of Burkina Faso whose communism has made him an American intervention target. The CIA wants Marie to ascertain how much Sankara knows about America’s involvement in his opposition\, and possibly seduce him — Marie has misgivings\, doubting the CIA’s motives\, but accepts the job anyway. She doesn’t expect\, however\, to be won over by the revolutionary politician: “The way he could make you feel. It was like he saw a version of you that was even more perfect than the version you saw of yourself.” \n  \n 
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/matters-of-state-literature-espionage/2021-05-20/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:American Literature,China,Classes/Events,Emancipation,Literary Studies,Marxist Method,Radical Literature
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/LockNKey.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20210513T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20210513T210000
DTSTAMP:20210503T002134Z
CREATED:20210313T044932Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210503T002134Z
UID:10006896-1620932400-1620939600@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Matters of State: Literature & Espionage
DESCRIPTION:The MEP Literature Reading Group takes on three more spy novels\n \nWhy Spy Novels? \nSpy novels emerged as a distinct genre around the time of World War I\, coinciding with the creation of formal intelligence agencies in many countries. This was a period characterized by heightened concern on the part of rulers about national security\, imperial strength\, and the impending conflict of the Great War. Spy novels from the early twentieth century reflect these concerns\, and generally feature secret agents and seemingly realistic tales of international intrigue. With the rise of fascism\, spy novels shifted their focus to examine the dynamics of political movements within individual states\, assessing their threats to the stability of the international political order. In these stories\, the anxiety over the powerlessness of the individual is assuaged by the resourcefulness and ultimate success of exceptional or lucky individuals in confronting such harrowing problems as war\, nuclear proliferation\, and terrorism. The verisimilitude of spy novels written in the twentieth century is an integral part of the genre’s popularity; the genre often reflects political\, economic\, and cultural anxieties as well as showcasing advances in surveillance technology. You will see reference to The Human Factor by Graham Greene below. The group has read and discussed this novel during April. \nTHE HUMAN FACTOR (1978) • GRAHAM GREENE Greene aimed with this book to write a novel of espionage free from the violence that is more typical of the genre. Another theme Greene explored was  Western capital’s hypocritical relations with South Africa under apartheid. He thought that even though some Western capitalists would often publicly oppose apartheid\, those same holders of capital “simply could not let South Africa succumb to black power and (or) communism.” \nA MAP OF BETRAYAL (2014) • HA JIN The protagonists of this novel occupy the “treacherous territory” of margins. Jin’s master spy is no 007 or George Smiley. What distinguishes Gary is his ordinariness\, “his simple\, casual fashion of conducting espionage.” A spare\, haunting tale of conflicted loyalties that spans half a century in the entwined histories of two countries—China and the United States—and two families as it explores the complicated terrain of love and honor. \nTHE SYMPATHIZER (2015) • VIET THANH NGUYEN The anonymous narrator has an “acrobatic ability” that guides the reader through the contradictions of the Vietnam War and American identity. Set as a flashback in the coerced confession of a double agent\, the book’s half-Vietnamese\, half-French narrator recounts the fall of the US-allied South Vietnamese Government in 1975 and subsequent events as its top officials flee to American exile in Los Angeles. \nAMERICAN SPY (2018) • LAUREN WILKINSON It’s 1986\, the tail end of the Cold War\, and Marie Mitchell has been tasked by the FBI with undermining Thomas Sankara\, the revolutionary president of Burkina Faso whose communism has made him an American intervention target. The CIA wants Marie to ascertain how much Sankara knows about America’s involvement in his opposition\, and possibly seduce him — Marie has misgivings\, doubting the CIA’s motives\, but accepts the job anyway. She doesn’t expect\, however\, to be won over by the revolutionary politician: “The way he could make you feel. It was like he saw a version of you that was even more perfect than the version you saw of yourself.” \n  \n 
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/matters-of-state-literature-espionage/2021-05-13/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:American Literature,China,Classes/Events,Emancipation,Literary Studies,Marxist Method,Radical Literature
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/LockNKey.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20210506T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20210506T210000
DTSTAMP:20210503T002134Z
CREATED:20210313T044932Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210503T002134Z
UID:10006895-1620327600-1620334800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Matters of State: Literature & Espionage
DESCRIPTION:The MEP Literature Reading Group takes on three more spy novels\n \nWhy Spy Novels? \nSpy novels emerged as a distinct genre around the time of World War I\, coinciding with the creation of formal intelligence agencies in many countries. This was a period characterized by heightened concern on the part of rulers about national security\, imperial strength\, and the impending conflict of the Great War. Spy novels from the early twentieth century reflect these concerns\, and generally feature secret agents and seemingly realistic tales of international intrigue. With the rise of fascism\, spy novels shifted their focus to examine the dynamics of political movements within individual states\, assessing their threats to the stability of the international political order. In these stories\, the anxiety over the powerlessness of the individual is assuaged by the resourcefulness and ultimate success of exceptional or lucky individuals in confronting such harrowing problems as war\, nuclear proliferation\, and terrorism. The verisimilitude of spy novels written in the twentieth century is an integral part of the genre’s popularity; the genre often reflects political\, economic\, and cultural anxieties as well as showcasing advances in surveillance technology. You will see reference to The Human Factor by Graham Greene below. The group has read and discussed this novel during April. \nTHE HUMAN FACTOR (1978) • GRAHAM GREENE Greene aimed with this book to write a novel of espionage free from the violence that is more typical of the genre. Another theme Greene explored was  Western capital’s hypocritical relations with South Africa under apartheid. He thought that even though some Western capitalists would often publicly oppose apartheid\, those same holders of capital “simply could not let South Africa succumb to black power and (or) communism.” \nA MAP OF BETRAYAL (2014) • HA JIN The protagonists of this novel occupy the “treacherous territory” of margins. Jin’s master spy is no 007 or George Smiley. What distinguishes Gary is his ordinariness\, “his simple\, casual fashion of conducting espionage.” A spare\, haunting tale of conflicted loyalties that spans half a century in the entwined histories of two countries—China and the United States—and two families as it explores the complicated terrain of love and honor. \nTHE SYMPATHIZER (2015) • VIET THANH NGUYEN The anonymous narrator has an “acrobatic ability” that guides the reader through the contradictions of the Vietnam War and American identity. Set as a flashback in the coerced confession of a double agent\, the book’s half-Vietnamese\, half-French narrator recounts the fall of the US-allied South Vietnamese Government in 1975 and subsequent events as its top officials flee to American exile in Los Angeles. \nAMERICAN SPY (2018) • LAUREN WILKINSON It’s 1986\, the tail end of the Cold War\, and Marie Mitchell has been tasked by the FBI with undermining Thomas Sankara\, the revolutionary president of Burkina Faso whose communism has made him an American intervention target. The CIA wants Marie to ascertain how much Sankara knows about America’s involvement in his opposition\, and possibly seduce him — Marie has misgivings\, doubting the CIA’s motives\, but accepts the job anyway. She doesn’t expect\, however\, to be won over by the revolutionary politician: “The way he could make you feel. It was like he saw a version of you that was even more perfect than the version you saw of yourself.” \n  \n 
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/matters-of-state-literature-espionage/2021-05-06/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:American Literature,China,Classes/Events,Emancipation,Literary Studies,Marxist Method,Radical Literature
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/LockNKey.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20210311T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20210311T210000
DTSTAMP:20210312T210306Z
CREATED:20201214T175355Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210312T210306Z
UID:10006843-1615489200-1615496400@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:M.A.D. Lit 101: American Fiction and the Cold War
DESCRIPTION:The year 1953 was like most of the years following the end of the slaughter of World War II. It was another year of the baby boom that filled maternity wards in the United States\, a generation that ironically couldn’t wait to leave these suburbs. The Cold War was well under way\, and anti-communism in the U.S. was at its peak. Politicians pontificated that it was “better to be dead than Red.” In the East and the West\, the military apparatus stockpiled nuclear weapons capable of ending life on this planet thousands of times over — Mutually Assured Destruction. \nWe began this reading group with Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” followed by a shared reading of Allen Ginsburg’s Howl\, and have nowcompleted our discussion of Ring Lardner\, Jr.’s The Ecstasy of Owen Muir. We have just started The Public Burning by Robert Coover\, after which we will read and discuss Richard Wright’s The Outsider. Coover’s novel is a political economy of the US as the hegemon of Post World War II capital global restructuring and the shift of much production to energy\, the military and finance and the attempted thorough destruction of any semblance of a left opposition. \nWhat can we learn from these literary renderings and how do they help us understand the perilous period in history that we now find ourselves living? \nThe MEP LITERATURE GROUP has been meeting to discuss literature since the first days of The Marxist Education Project following a presentation by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on her Indigenous Peoples History of the United States and her recommendation that we take up literature with Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of The Dead. The group has rcompleted readings of Victor Serge’s Unforgiving Years which was followed by Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Other studies have included novels related to World War I\, the depression of the 1930s\, and novels on migration\,border politics and labor organizing and our most recent session on Women Who Wrote Against Fascism\, and this summer will the group will host a 5th consecutive Noir Summer.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/m-a-d-lit-101-american-fiction-and-the-cold-war/2021-03-11/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:American Literature,Classes/Events,Literary Studies,Multi-session Classes,Race and Class,Radical Literature,Revolutions Study Group,Science and Technology,Seminars and Talks
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/MutualAssuredScreenSmallest.jpg
ORGANIZER;CN="MEP Literature Group":MAILTO:info@marxedproject.org
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20210304T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20210304T210000
DTSTAMP:20210312T210306Z
CREATED:20201214T175355Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210312T210306Z
UID:10006842-1614884400-1614891600@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:M.A.D. Lit 101: American Fiction and the Cold War
DESCRIPTION:The year 1953 was like most of the years following the end of the slaughter of World War II. It was another year of the baby boom that filled maternity wards in the United States\, a generation that ironically couldn’t wait to leave these suburbs. The Cold War was well under way\, and anti-communism in the U.S. was at its peak. Politicians pontificated that it was “better to be dead than Red.” In the East and the West\, the military apparatus stockpiled nuclear weapons capable of ending life on this planet thousands of times over — Mutually Assured Destruction. \nWe began this reading group with Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” followed by a shared reading of Allen Ginsburg’s Howl\, and have nowcompleted our discussion of Ring Lardner\, Jr.’s The Ecstasy of Owen Muir. We have just started The Public Burning by Robert Coover\, after which we will read and discuss Richard Wright’s The Outsider. Coover’s novel is a political economy of the US as the hegemon of Post World War II capital global restructuring and the shift of much production to energy\, the military and finance and the attempted thorough destruction of any semblance of a left opposition. \nWhat can we learn from these literary renderings and how do they help us understand the perilous period in history that we now find ourselves living? \nThe MEP LITERATURE GROUP has been meeting to discuss literature since the first days of The Marxist Education Project following a presentation by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on her Indigenous Peoples History of the United States and her recommendation that we take up literature with Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of The Dead. The group has rcompleted readings of Victor Serge’s Unforgiving Years which was followed by Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Other studies have included novels related to World War I\, the depression of the 1930s\, and novels on migration\,border politics and labor organizing and our most recent session on Women Who Wrote Against Fascism\, and this summer will the group will host a 5th consecutive Noir Summer.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/m-a-d-lit-101-american-fiction-and-the-cold-war/2021-03-04/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:American Literature,Classes/Events,Literary Studies,Multi-session Classes,Race and Class,Radical Literature,Revolutions Study Group,Science and Technology,Seminars and Talks
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/MutualAssuredScreenSmallest.jpg
ORGANIZER;CN="MEP Literature Group":MAILTO:info@marxedproject.org
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20210225T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20210225T210000
DTSTAMP:20210312T210306Z
CREATED:20201214T175355Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210312T210306Z
UID:10006841-1614279600-1614286800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:M.A.D. Lit 101: American Fiction and the Cold War
DESCRIPTION:The year 1953 was like most of the years following the end of the slaughter of World War II. It was another year of the baby boom that filled maternity wards in the United States\, a generation that ironically couldn’t wait to leave these suburbs. The Cold War was well under way\, and anti-communism in the U.S. was at its peak. Politicians pontificated that it was “better to be dead than Red.” In the East and the West\, the military apparatus stockpiled nuclear weapons capable of ending life on this planet thousands of times over — Mutually Assured Destruction. \nWe began this reading group with Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” followed by a shared reading of Allen Ginsburg’s Howl\, and have nowcompleted our discussion of Ring Lardner\, Jr.’s The Ecstasy of Owen Muir. We have just started The Public Burning by Robert Coover\, after which we will read and discuss Richard Wright’s The Outsider. Coover’s novel is a political economy of the US as the hegemon of Post World War II capital global restructuring and the shift of much production to energy\, the military and finance and the attempted thorough destruction of any semblance of a left opposition. \nWhat can we learn from these literary renderings and how do they help us understand the perilous period in history that we now find ourselves living? \nThe MEP LITERATURE GROUP has been meeting to discuss literature since the first days of The Marxist Education Project following a presentation by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on her Indigenous Peoples History of the United States and her recommendation that we take up literature with Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of The Dead. The group has rcompleted readings of Victor Serge’s Unforgiving Years which was followed by Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Other studies have included novels related to World War I\, the depression of the 1930s\, and novels on migration\,border politics and labor organizing and our most recent session on Women Who Wrote Against Fascism\, and this summer will the group will host a 5th consecutive Noir Summer.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/m-a-d-lit-101-american-fiction-and-the-cold-war/2021-02-25/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:American Literature,Classes/Events,Literary Studies,Multi-session Classes,Race and Class,Radical Literature,Revolutions Study Group,Science and Technology,Seminars and Talks
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/MutualAssuredScreenSmallest.jpg
ORGANIZER;CN="MEP Literature Group":MAILTO:info@marxedproject.org
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20210218T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20210218T210000
DTSTAMP:20210312T210306Z
CREATED:20201214T175355Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210312T210306Z
UID:10006840-1613674800-1613682000@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:M.A.D. Lit 101: American Fiction and the Cold War
DESCRIPTION:The year 1953 was like most of the years following the end of the slaughter of World War II. It was another year of the baby boom that filled maternity wards in the United States\, a generation that ironically couldn’t wait to leave these suburbs. The Cold War was well under way\, and anti-communism in the U.S. was at its peak. Politicians pontificated that it was “better to be dead than Red.” In the East and the West\, the military apparatus stockpiled nuclear weapons capable of ending life on this planet thousands of times over — Mutually Assured Destruction. \nWe began this reading group with Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” followed by a shared reading of Allen Ginsburg’s Howl\, and have nowcompleted our discussion of Ring Lardner\, Jr.’s The Ecstasy of Owen Muir. We have just started The Public Burning by Robert Coover\, after which we will read and discuss Richard Wright’s The Outsider. Coover’s novel is a political economy of the US as the hegemon of Post World War II capital global restructuring and the shift of much production to energy\, the military and finance and the attempted thorough destruction of any semblance of a left opposition. \nWhat can we learn from these literary renderings and how do they help us understand the perilous period in history that we now find ourselves living? \nThe MEP LITERATURE GROUP has been meeting to discuss literature since the first days of The Marxist Education Project following a presentation by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on her Indigenous Peoples History of the United States and her recommendation that we take up literature with Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of The Dead. The group has rcompleted readings of Victor Serge’s Unforgiving Years which was followed by Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Other studies have included novels related to World War I\, the depression of the 1930s\, and novels on migration\,border politics and labor organizing and our most recent session on Women Who Wrote Against Fascism\, and this summer will the group will host a 5th consecutive Noir Summer.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/m-a-d-lit-101-american-fiction-and-the-cold-war/2021-02-18/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:American Literature,Classes/Events,Literary Studies,Multi-session Classes,Race and Class,Radical Literature,Revolutions Study Group,Science and Technology,Seminars and Talks
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/MutualAssuredScreenSmallest.jpg
ORGANIZER;CN="MEP Literature Group":MAILTO:info@marxedproject.org
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20210211T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20210211T210000
DTSTAMP:20210312T210306Z
CREATED:20201214T175355Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210312T210306Z
UID:10006839-1613070000-1613077200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:M.A.D. Lit 101: American Fiction and the Cold War
DESCRIPTION:The year 1953 was like most of the years following the end of the slaughter of World War II. It was another year of the baby boom that filled maternity wards in the United States\, a generation that ironically couldn’t wait to leave these suburbs. The Cold War was well under way\, and anti-communism in the U.S. was at its peak. Politicians pontificated that it was “better to be dead than Red.” In the East and the West\, the military apparatus stockpiled nuclear weapons capable of ending life on this planet thousands of times over — Mutually Assured Destruction. \nWe began this reading group with Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” followed by a shared reading of Allen Ginsburg’s Howl\, and have nowcompleted our discussion of Ring Lardner\, Jr.’s The Ecstasy of Owen Muir. We have just started The Public Burning by Robert Coover\, after which we will read and discuss Richard Wright’s The Outsider. Coover’s novel is a political economy of the US as the hegemon of Post World War II capital global restructuring and the shift of much production to energy\, the military and finance and the attempted thorough destruction of any semblance of a left opposition. \nWhat can we learn from these literary renderings and how do they help us understand the perilous period in history that we now find ourselves living? \nThe MEP LITERATURE GROUP has been meeting to discuss literature since the first days of The Marxist Education Project following a presentation by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on her Indigenous Peoples History of the United States and her recommendation that we take up literature with Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of The Dead. The group has rcompleted readings of Victor Serge’s Unforgiving Years which was followed by Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Other studies have included novels related to World War I\, the depression of the 1930s\, and novels on migration\,border politics and labor organizing and our most recent session on Women Who Wrote Against Fascism\, and this summer will the group will host a 5th consecutive Noir Summer.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/m-a-d-lit-101-american-fiction-and-the-cold-war/2021-02-11/
LOCATION:Online Event – Zoom Meeting
CATEGORIES:American Literature,Classes/Events,Literary Studies,Multi-session Classes,Race and Class,Radical Literature,Revolutions Study Group,Science and Technology,Seminars and Talks
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/MutualAssuredScreenSmallest.jpg
ORGANIZER;CN="MEP Literature Group":MAILTO:info@marxedproject.org
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20210104T003000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20210104T233000
DTSTAMP:20210123T032405Z
CREATED:20200924T055234Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210123T032405Z
UID:10006146-1609720200-1609803000@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:4 Month Pass:
DESCRIPTION:Support the MEP and save $ for yourself. Four month pass now $50 less than new six month pass!\nFor a one-time sliding scale fee of $100\, $150\, or $200 attend any and all classes and events of The Marxist Education Project. For $50 or $75 more bring a guest as often as you would like to the classes and events between now and May 31\, 2021. We are hosting many new series including a new literature class\, MAD Lit 101: American Fiction and the Cold War  beginning on January 14\, a continuation of Capital\, Volume 1 class\, a repeat of the popular Blood and Money\, Considerations on Bolshevism before Stalinism\, a reading and discussion group of Hadas Thier’s A People’s Guide to Capitalism\, a multi-session series covering the Socialist Register 2021 annual\, Beyond Digital Capitalism: New Ways of Living\, and  the 4 new events related to the Pluto Press Fireworks Series which begins on January 23 with Marina Sitrin and Colectiva Sembrar on Pandemic Solidarity\, the first book to be presented. The way the calendar works within our WordPress based site may make this confusing. It is a one-time payment good from now through May 21. You may also use this course as a contribution button to help The MEP get through this challenging Covid-19 period where much of our constituency have lost income and will during the next months lose unemployment compensation without a lengthy extension. You can also attend the new series sponsored by Palsgrave on Marx\, Engels\, and Marxisms along with Rowan and Littlefield’s new Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg series of events.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/until-mid-winter-pass-now-through-january-31-2021/
LOCATION:All Venues
CATEGORIES:African American History,American Literature,automation,Bolshevism,Capital Studies,Caribbean Studies,Class,Class and Gender,Classes/Events,Extractivism,Film Screenings,Literary Studies,Marx's Capital,Multi-session Classes
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Capital_Rivera2ForSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200409T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200409T213000
DTSTAMP:20200129T031424Z
CREATED:20191231T140728Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200129T031424Z
UID:10006121-1586460600-1586467800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:American Writing: Changing Locations
DESCRIPTION:American Writing: 4 Seasons \nSeason 1: Changing Places in America\nHerman Melville\,  The Confidence-Man (1857). John Barth\, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) Lisa Ko\, The Leavers (2017) \nIn his 1970 essay “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction\,” William Gass brought the term “metafiction” forward to the reading public as a way to characterize the work writers such as Borges\, Barth\, Flann O’Brien\, as well as the type of novels Gass himself would write. He described metafiction as writing “in which the forms of fiction serve as the material upon which further forms can be imposed”. Does metafiction provide escape for the committed writer from the bourgeois strictures that the novel form imposes? As critical readers we need to check out all the angles. The metafiction form will over time become incorporated as yet another aspect of modern fiction as ultimately there is no way to over-ride what happens when ink is committed to paper\, impulses to the interactive screen. \nAmerican fiction writers have lots to write about. We are introducing a four term look at writing by American authors who have novels appropriate to four themes important to critical thinkers of the broad American questions on nation\, class\, race and gender. Much of this fiction becomes part of what our unfolding reality is as a nation\, group of nations\, as aspiring internationalists. Many of the fictional works we will read are not as formally postmodern or would formally fall in the metafiction category as delineated by Barth. \nOur first thematic 12 week term concerns Change of Place. \nThis first session will begin with Melville. Though centered around the title character\, Melville’s The Confidence-Man portrays passengers on a steamboat with stories that are told as they travel to New Orleans down the Mississippi River. The narrative structure is reminiscent the Canterbury Tales.The novel is written as cultural satire\, and metaphysical treatise\, and deals with a number of themes including sincerity\, economic dislocation and materialism\, identity\, cynicism\, and more.Many critics have placed The Confidence-Man alongside Moby Dick and “Bartleby\, the Scrivener”  as precursors to 20th-century literary preoccupations around nihilism\, the absurd and existentialism. \nDale Jones citing R. W. B. Lewis\, who feels the necessity of defining a new genre for [The Confidence- Man] and its literary descendants: “it is the recognizable and awe-inspiring ancestor of several subse- quent works of fiction in America: Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger\, Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust\, Faulkner’s The Hamlet\, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man\, John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor\, Thomas Pynchon’s V. Melville bequeathed to those works . . . the vision of an apocalypse that is no less terrible for being enormously comic\, the self-extinction of a world characterized by deceit and thronging with imposters and masqueraders…” \nA worthy contender for the title of Great American Novel\, Barth’s masterpiece is a work of astonishing virtuosity and range to some. Others look at this\, as did the author himself\, as the end of the novel as known before it’s publication. Barth had changed midstream in the writing of The Sot-Weed Factor. Among American novels\, in terms of sheer linguistic brilliance\, it is surpassed only by Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and Melville’s matchless Moby Dick. \nHere is Barth’s opening sentence: “In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy\, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke\, more ambitious than talented\, and yet more talented than prudent\, who\, like his friends-in-folly\, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge\, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over\, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship\, had learned the knack of versifying\, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day\, afroth with Joves and Jupiters\, aclang with jarring rhymes\, and string-taught with similes stretched to the snapping point.” \nThis Cooke does as an early settler\, bounding from London cafes to the “wilds” of Maryland\, in this novel depicting the consciousness\, in mid-20th century post-modernism\, the colonizing beings early on inhabiting the North American contenent. \nSet in New York and China\, The Leavers is a vivid examination of borders and belonging. It’s a moving story of how a boy comes into his own when everything he loves is taken away\, and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of the past. \nOne morning\, Deming Guo’s mother\, Polly\, an undocumented Chinese immigrant\, goes to her job at a nail salon—and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her. With his mother gone\, eleven-year-old Deming is left mystified and bereft. Eventually adopted by a pair of well-meaning white professors\, Deming is moved from the Bronx to a small town upstate and renamed Daniel Wilkinson. But far from all he’s ever known\, Daniel struggles to reconcile his adoptive parents’ desire that he assimilate with his memories of his mother and the community he left behind. \nTold from the perspective of both Daniel—as he grows into a directionless young man—and Polly\, Ko’s novel gives us one of fiction’s most singular mothers. Loving and selfish\, determined and frightened\, Polly is forced to make one heart-wrenching choice after another. \nUpcoming terms will include the following: William Gass\, Middle C\, Maxine Hong Kingston\,Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book\, Ishmael Reed\, Mumbo Jumbo\, Russell Banks\, Cloudsplitter\, Jeffrey Eugenides\, Middlesex\, Gina Apostol\, Insurrecto and more.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/american-writing-changing-locations/2020-04-09/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:American Literature,Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Lit_ChangingLocale_Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200402T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200402T213000
DTSTAMP:20200129T031424Z
CREATED:20191231T140728Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200129T031424Z
UID:10006120-1585855800-1585863000@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:American Writing: Changing Locations
DESCRIPTION:American Writing: 4 Seasons \nSeason 1: Changing Places in America\nHerman Melville\,  The Confidence-Man (1857). John Barth\, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) Lisa Ko\, The Leavers (2017) \nIn his 1970 essay “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction\,” William Gass brought the term “metafiction” forward to the reading public as a way to characterize the work writers such as Borges\, Barth\, Flann O’Brien\, as well as the type of novels Gass himself would write. He described metafiction as writing “in which the forms of fiction serve as the material upon which further forms can be imposed”. Does metafiction provide escape for the committed writer from the bourgeois strictures that the novel form imposes? As critical readers we need to check out all the angles. The metafiction form will over time become incorporated as yet another aspect of modern fiction as ultimately there is no way to over-ride what happens when ink is committed to paper\, impulses to the interactive screen. \nAmerican fiction writers have lots to write about. We are introducing a four term look at writing by American authors who have novels appropriate to four themes important to critical thinkers of the broad American questions on nation\, class\, race and gender. Much of this fiction becomes part of what our unfolding reality is as a nation\, group of nations\, as aspiring internationalists. Many of the fictional works we will read are not as formally postmodern or would formally fall in the metafiction category as delineated by Barth. \nOur first thematic 12 week term concerns Change of Place. \nThis first session will begin with Melville. Though centered around the title character\, Melville’s The Confidence-Man portrays passengers on a steamboat with stories that are told as they travel to New Orleans down the Mississippi River. The narrative structure is reminiscent the Canterbury Tales.The novel is written as cultural satire\, and metaphysical treatise\, and deals with a number of themes including sincerity\, economic dislocation and materialism\, identity\, cynicism\, and more.Many critics have placed The Confidence-Man alongside Moby Dick and “Bartleby\, the Scrivener”  as precursors to 20th-century literary preoccupations around nihilism\, the absurd and existentialism. \nDale Jones citing R. W. B. Lewis\, who feels the necessity of defining a new genre for [The Confidence- Man] and its literary descendants: “it is the recognizable and awe-inspiring ancestor of several subse- quent works of fiction in America: Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger\, Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust\, Faulkner’s The Hamlet\, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man\, John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor\, Thomas Pynchon’s V. Melville bequeathed to those works . . . the vision of an apocalypse that is no less terrible for being enormously comic\, the self-extinction of a world characterized by deceit and thronging with imposters and masqueraders…” \nA worthy contender for the title of Great American Novel\, Barth’s masterpiece is a work of astonishing virtuosity and range to some. Others look at this\, as did the author himself\, as the end of the novel as known before it’s publication. Barth had changed midstream in the writing of The Sot-Weed Factor. Among American novels\, in terms of sheer linguistic brilliance\, it is surpassed only by Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and Melville’s matchless Moby Dick. \nHere is Barth’s opening sentence: “In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy\, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke\, more ambitious than talented\, and yet more talented than prudent\, who\, like his friends-in-folly\, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge\, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over\, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship\, had learned the knack of versifying\, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day\, afroth with Joves and Jupiters\, aclang with jarring rhymes\, and string-taught with similes stretched to the snapping point.” \nThis Cooke does as an early settler\, bounding from London cafes to the “wilds” of Maryland\, in this novel depicting the consciousness\, in mid-20th century post-modernism\, the colonizing beings early on inhabiting the North American contenent. \nSet in New York and China\, The Leavers is a vivid examination of borders and belonging. It’s a moving story of how a boy comes into his own when everything he loves is taken away\, and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of the past. \nOne morning\, Deming Guo’s mother\, Polly\, an undocumented Chinese immigrant\, goes to her job at a nail salon—and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her. With his mother gone\, eleven-year-old Deming is left mystified and bereft. Eventually adopted by a pair of well-meaning white professors\, Deming is moved from the Bronx to a small town upstate and renamed Daniel Wilkinson. But far from all he’s ever known\, Daniel struggles to reconcile his adoptive parents’ desire that he assimilate with his memories of his mother and the community he left behind. \nTold from the perspective of both Daniel—as he grows into a directionless young man—and Polly\, Ko’s novel gives us one of fiction’s most singular mothers. Loving and selfish\, determined and frightened\, Polly is forced to make one heart-wrenching choice after another. \nUpcoming terms will include the following: William Gass\, Middle C\, Maxine Hong Kingston\,Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book\, Ishmael Reed\, Mumbo Jumbo\, Russell Banks\, Cloudsplitter\, Jeffrey Eugenides\, Middlesex\, Gina Apostol\, Insurrecto and more.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/american-writing-changing-locations/2020-04-02/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:American Literature,Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Lit_ChangingLocale_Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200326T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200326T213000
DTSTAMP:20200129T031424Z
CREATED:20191231T140728Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200129T031424Z
UID:10006119-1585251000-1585258200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:American Writing: Changing Locations
DESCRIPTION:American Writing: 4 Seasons \nSeason 1: Changing Places in America\nHerman Melville\,  The Confidence-Man (1857). John Barth\, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) Lisa Ko\, The Leavers (2017) \nIn his 1970 essay “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction\,” William Gass brought the term “metafiction” forward to the reading public as a way to characterize the work writers such as Borges\, Barth\, Flann O’Brien\, as well as the type of novels Gass himself would write. He described metafiction as writing “in which the forms of fiction serve as the material upon which further forms can be imposed”. Does metafiction provide escape for the committed writer from the bourgeois strictures that the novel form imposes? As critical readers we need to check out all the angles. The metafiction form will over time become incorporated as yet another aspect of modern fiction as ultimately there is no way to over-ride what happens when ink is committed to paper\, impulses to the interactive screen. \nAmerican fiction writers have lots to write about. We are introducing a four term look at writing by American authors who have novels appropriate to four themes important to critical thinkers of the broad American questions on nation\, class\, race and gender. Much of this fiction becomes part of what our unfolding reality is as a nation\, group of nations\, as aspiring internationalists. Many of the fictional works we will read are not as formally postmodern or would formally fall in the metafiction category as delineated by Barth. \nOur first thematic 12 week term concerns Change of Place. \nThis first session will begin with Melville. Though centered around the title character\, Melville’s The Confidence-Man portrays passengers on a steamboat with stories that are told as they travel to New Orleans down the Mississippi River. The narrative structure is reminiscent the Canterbury Tales.The novel is written as cultural satire\, and metaphysical treatise\, and deals with a number of themes including sincerity\, economic dislocation and materialism\, identity\, cynicism\, and more.Many critics have placed The Confidence-Man alongside Moby Dick and “Bartleby\, the Scrivener”  as precursors to 20th-century literary preoccupations around nihilism\, the absurd and existentialism. \nDale Jones citing R. W. B. Lewis\, who feels the necessity of defining a new genre for [The Confidence- Man] and its literary descendants: “it is the recognizable and awe-inspiring ancestor of several subse- quent works of fiction in America: Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger\, Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust\, Faulkner’s The Hamlet\, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man\, John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor\, Thomas Pynchon’s V. Melville bequeathed to those works . . . the vision of an apocalypse that is no less terrible for being enormously comic\, the self-extinction of a world characterized by deceit and thronging with imposters and masqueraders…” \nA worthy contender for the title of Great American Novel\, Barth’s masterpiece is a work of astonishing virtuosity and range to some. Others look at this\, as did the author himself\, as the end of the novel as known before it’s publication. Barth had changed midstream in the writing of The Sot-Weed Factor. Among American novels\, in terms of sheer linguistic brilliance\, it is surpassed only by Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and Melville’s matchless Moby Dick. \nHere is Barth’s opening sentence: “In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy\, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke\, more ambitious than talented\, and yet more talented than prudent\, who\, like his friends-in-folly\, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge\, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over\, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship\, had learned the knack of versifying\, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day\, afroth with Joves and Jupiters\, aclang with jarring rhymes\, and string-taught with similes stretched to the snapping point.” \nThis Cooke does as an early settler\, bounding from London cafes to the “wilds” of Maryland\, in this novel depicting the consciousness\, in mid-20th century post-modernism\, the colonizing beings early on inhabiting the North American contenent. \nSet in New York and China\, The Leavers is a vivid examination of borders and belonging. It’s a moving story of how a boy comes into his own when everything he loves is taken away\, and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of the past. \nOne morning\, Deming Guo’s mother\, Polly\, an undocumented Chinese immigrant\, goes to her job at a nail salon—and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her. With his mother gone\, eleven-year-old Deming is left mystified and bereft. Eventually adopted by a pair of well-meaning white professors\, Deming is moved from the Bronx to a small town upstate and renamed Daniel Wilkinson. But far from all he’s ever known\, Daniel struggles to reconcile his adoptive parents’ desire that he assimilate with his memories of his mother and the community he left behind. \nTold from the perspective of both Daniel—as he grows into a directionless young man—and Polly\, Ko’s novel gives us one of fiction’s most singular mothers. Loving and selfish\, determined and frightened\, Polly is forced to make one heart-wrenching choice after another. \nUpcoming terms will include the following: William Gass\, Middle C\, Maxine Hong Kingston\,Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book\, Ishmael Reed\, Mumbo Jumbo\, Russell Banks\, Cloudsplitter\, Jeffrey Eugenides\, Middlesex\, Gina Apostol\, Insurrecto and more.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/american-writing-changing-locations/2020-03-26/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:American Literature,Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Lit_ChangingLocale_Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200319T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200319T213000
DTSTAMP:20200129T031424Z
CREATED:20191231T140728Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200129T031424Z
UID:10006118-1584646200-1584653400@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:American Writing: Changing Locations
DESCRIPTION:American Writing: 4 Seasons \nSeason 1: Changing Places in America\nHerman Melville\,  The Confidence-Man (1857). John Barth\, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) Lisa Ko\, The Leavers (2017) \nIn his 1970 essay “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction\,” William Gass brought the term “metafiction” forward to the reading public as a way to characterize the work writers such as Borges\, Barth\, Flann O’Brien\, as well as the type of novels Gass himself would write. He described metafiction as writing “in which the forms of fiction serve as the material upon which further forms can be imposed”. Does metafiction provide escape for the committed writer from the bourgeois strictures that the novel form imposes? As critical readers we need to check out all the angles. The metafiction form will over time become incorporated as yet another aspect of modern fiction as ultimately there is no way to over-ride what happens when ink is committed to paper\, impulses to the interactive screen. \nAmerican fiction writers have lots to write about. We are introducing a four term look at writing by American authors who have novels appropriate to four themes important to critical thinkers of the broad American questions on nation\, class\, race and gender. Much of this fiction becomes part of what our unfolding reality is as a nation\, group of nations\, as aspiring internationalists. Many of the fictional works we will read are not as formally postmodern or would formally fall in the metafiction category as delineated by Barth. \nOur first thematic 12 week term concerns Change of Place. \nThis first session will begin with Melville. Though centered around the title character\, Melville’s The Confidence-Man portrays passengers on a steamboat with stories that are told as they travel to New Orleans down the Mississippi River. The narrative structure is reminiscent the Canterbury Tales.The novel is written as cultural satire\, and metaphysical treatise\, and deals with a number of themes including sincerity\, economic dislocation and materialism\, identity\, cynicism\, and more.Many critics have placed The Confidence-Man alongside Moby Dick and “Bartleby\, the Scrivener”  as precursors to 20th-century literary preoccupations around nihilism\, the absurd and existentialism. \nDale Jones citing R. W. B. Lewis\, who feels the necessity of defining a new genre for [The Confidence- Man] and its literary descendants: “it is the recognizable and awe-inspiring ancestor of several subse- quent works of fiction in America: Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger\, Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust\, Faulkner’s The Hamlet\, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man\, John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor\, Thomas Pynchon’s V. Melville bequeathed to those works . . . the vision of an apocalypse that is no less terrible for being enormously comic\, the self-extinction of a world characterized by deceit and thronging with imposters and masqueraders…” \nA worthy contender for the title of Great American Novel\, Barth’s masterpiece is a work of astonishing virtuosity and range to some. Others look at this\, as did the author himself\, as the end of the novel as known before it’s publication. Barth had changed midstream in the writing of The Sot-Weed Factor. Among American novels\, in terms of sheer linguistic brilliance\, it is surpassed only by Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and Melville’s matchless Moby Dick. \nHere is Barth’s opening sentence: “In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy\, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke\, more ambitious than talented\, and yet more talented than prudent\, who\, like his friends-in-folly\, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge\, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over\, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship\, had learned the knack of versifying\, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day\, afroth with Joves and Jupiters\, aclang with jarring rhymes\, and string-taught with similes stretched to the snapping point.” \nThis Cooke does as an early settler\, bounding from London cafes to the “wilds” of Maryland\, in this novel depicting the consciousness\, in mid-20th century post-modernism\, the colonizing beings early on inhabiting the North American contenent. \nSet in New York and China\, The Leavers is a vivid examination of borders and belonging. It’s a moving story of how a boy comes into his own when everything he loves is taken away\, and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of the past. \nOne morning\, Deming Guo’s mother\, Polly\, an undocumented Chinese immigrant\, goes to her job at a nail salon—and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her. With his mother gone\, eleven-year-old Deming is left mystified and bereft. Eventually adopted by a pair of well-meaning white professors\, Deming is moved from the Bronx to a small town upstate and renamed Daniel Wilkinson. But far from all he’s ever known\, Daniel struggles to reconcile his adoptive parents’ desire that he assimilate with his memories of his mother and the community he left behind. \nTold from the perspective of both Daniel—as he grows into a directionless young man—and Polly\, Ko’s novel gives us one of fiction’s most singular mothers. Loving and selfish\, determined and frightened\, Polly is forced to make one heart-wrenching choice after another. \nUpcoming terms will include the following: William Gass\, Middle C\, Maxine Hong Kingston\,Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book\, Ishmael Reed\, Mumbo Jumbo\, Russell Banks\, Cloudsplitter\, Jeffrey Eugenides\, Middlesex\, Gina Apostol\, Insurrecto and more.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/american-writing-changing-locations/2020-03-19/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:American Literature,Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Lit_ChangingLocale_Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200312T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200312T213000
DTSTAMP:20200129T031424Z
CREATED:20191231T140728Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200129T031424Z
UID:10006117-1584041400-1584048600@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:American Writing: Changing Locations
DESCRIPTION:American Writing: 4 Seasons \nSeason 1: Changing Places in America\nHerman Melville\,  The Confidence-Man (1857). John Barth\, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) Lisa Ko\, The Leavers (2017) \nIn his 1970 essay “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction\,” William Gass brought the term “metafiction” forward to the reading public as a way to characterize the work writers such as Borges\, Barth\, Flann O’Brien\, as well as the type of novels Gass himself would write. He described metafiction as writing “in which the forms of fiction serve as the material upon which further forms can be imposed”. Does metafiction provide escape for the committed writer from the bourgeois strictures that the novel form imposes? As critical readers we need to check out all the angles. The metafiction form will over time become incorporated as yet another aspect of modern fiction as ultimately there is no way to over-ride what happens when ink is committed to paper\, impulses to the interactive screen. \nAmerican fiction writers have lots to write about. We are introducing a four term look at writing by American authors who have novels appropriate to four themes important to critical thinkers of the broad American questions on nation\, class\, race and gender. Much of this fiction becomes part of what our unfolding reality is as a nation\, group of nations\, as aspiring internationalists. Many of the fictional works we will read are not as formally postmodern or would formally fall in the metafiction category as delineated by Barth. \nOur first thematic 12 week term concerns Change of Place. \nThis first session will begin with Melville. Though centered around the title character\, Melville’s The Confidence-Man portrays passengers on a steamboat with stories that are told as they travel to New Orleans down the Mississippi River. The narrative structure is reminiscent the Canterbury Tales.The novel is written as cultural satire\, and metaphysical treatise\, and deals with a number of themes including sincerity\, economic dislocation and materialism\, identity\, cynicism\, and more.Many critics have placed The Confidence-Man alongside Moby Dick and “Bartleby\, the Scrivener”  as precursors to 20th-century literary preoccupations around nihilism\, the absurd and existentialism. \nDale Jones citing R. W. B. Lewis\, who feels the necessity of defining a new genre for [The Confidence- Man] and its literary descendants: “it is the recognizable and awe-inspiring ancestor of several subse- quent works of fiction in America: Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger\, Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust\, Faulkner’s The Hamlet\, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man\, John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor\, Thomas Pynchon’s V. Melville bequeathed to those works . . . the vision of an apocalypse that is no less terrible for being enormously comic\, the self-extinction of a world characterized by deceit and thronging with imposters and masqueraders…” \nA worthy contender for the title of Great American Novel\, Barth’s masterpiece is a work of astonishing virtuosity and range to some. Others look at this\, as did the author himself\, as the end of the novel as known before it’s publication. Barth had changed midstream in the writing of The Sot-Weed Factor. Among American novels\, in terms of sheer linguistic brilliance\, it is surpassed only by Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and Melville’s matchless Moby Dick. \nHere is Barth’s opening sentence: “In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy\, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke\, more ambitious than talented\, and yet more talented than prudent\, who\, like his friends-in-folly\, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge\, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over\, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship\, had learned the knack of versifying\, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day\, afroth with Joves and Jupiters\, aclang with jarring rhymes\, and string-taught with similes stretched to the snapping point.” \nThis Cooke does as an early settler\, bounding from London cafes to the “wilds” of Maryland\, in this novel depicting the consciousness\, in mid-20th century post-modernism\, the colonizing beings early on inhabiting the North American contenent. \nSet in New York and China\, The Leavers is a vivid examination of borders and belonging. It’s a moving story of how a boy comes into his own when everything he loves is taken away\, and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of the past. \nOne morning\, Deming Guo’s mother\, Polly\, an undocumented Chinese immigrant\, goes to her job at a nail salon—and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her. With his mother gone\, eleven-year-old Deming is left mystified and bereft. Eventually adopted by a pair of well-meaning white professors\, Deming is moved from the Bronx to a small town upstate and renamed Daniel Wilkinson. But far from all he’s ever known\, Daniel struggles to reconcile his adoptive parents’ desire that he assimilate with his memories of his mother and the community he left behind. \nTold from the perspective of both Daniel—as he grows into a directionless young man—and Polly\, Ko’s novel gives us one of fiction’s most singular mothers. Loving and selfish\, determined and frightened\, Polly is forced to make one heart-wrenching choice after another. \nUpcoming terms will include the following: William Gass\, Middle C\, Maxine Hong Kingston\,Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book\, Ishmael Reed\, Mumbo Jumbo\, Russell Banks\, Cloudsplitter\, Jeffrey Eugenides\, Middlesex\, Gina Apostol\, Insurrecto and more.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/american-writing-changing-locations/2020-03-12/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:American Literature,Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Lit_ChangingLocale_Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200305T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200305T213000
DTSTAMP:20200129T031424Z
CREATED:20191231T140728Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200129T031424Z
UID:10006116-1583436600-1583443800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:American Writing: Changing Locations
DESCRIPTION:American Writing: 4 Seasons \nSeason 1: Changing Places in America\nHerman Melville\,  The Confidence-Man (1857). John Barth\, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) Lisa Ko\, The Leavers (2017) \nIn his 1970 essay “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction\,” William Gass brought the term “metafiction” forward to the reading public as a way to characterize the work writers such as Borges\, Barth\, Flann O’Brien\, as well as the type of novels Gass himself would write. He described metafiction as writing “in which the forms of fiction serve as the material upon which further forms can be imposed”. Does metafiction provide escape for the committed writer from the bourgeois strictures that the novel form imposes? As critical readers we need to check out all the angles. The metafiction form will over time become incorporated as yet another aspect of modern fiction as ultimately there is no way to over-ride what happens when ink is committed to paper\, impulses to the interactive screen. \nAmerican fiction writers have lots to write about. We are introducing a four term look at writing by American authors who have novels appropriate to four themes important to critical thinkers of the broad American questions on nation\, class\, race and gender. Much of this fiction becomes part of what our unfolding reality is as a nation\, group of nations\, as aspiring internationalists. Many of the fictional works we will read are not as formally postmodern or would formally fall in the metafiction category as delineated by Barth. \nOur first thematic 12 week term concerns Change of Place. \nThis first session will begin with Melville. Though centered around the title character\, Melville’s The Confidence-Man portrays passengers on a steamboat with stories that are told as they travel to New Orleans down the Mississippi River. The narrative structure is reminiscent the Canterbury Tales.The novel is written as cultural satire\, and metaphysical treatise\, and deals with a number of themes including sincerity\, economic dislocation and materialism\, identity\, cynicism\, and more.Many critics have placed The Confidence-Man alongside Moby Dick and “Bartleby\, the Scrivener”  as precursors to 20th-century literary preoccupations around nihilism\, the absurd and existentialism. \nDale Jones citing R. W. B. Lewis\, who feels the necessity of defining a new genre for [The Confidence- Man] and its literary descendants: “it is the recognizable and awe-inspiring ancestor of several subse- quent works of fiction in America: Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger\, Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust\, Faulkner’s The Hamlet\, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man\, John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor\, Thomas Pynchon’s V. Melville bequeathed to those works . . . the vision of an apocalypse that is no less terrible for being enormously comic\, the self-extinction of a world characterized by deceit and thronging with imposters and masqueraders…” \nA worthy contender for the title of Great American Novel\, Barth’s masterpiece is a work of astonishing virtuosity and range to some. Others look at this\, as did the author himself\, as the end of the novel as known before it’s publication. Barth had changed midstream in the writing of The Sot-Weed Factor. Among American novels\, in terms of sheer linguistic brilliance\, it is surpassed only by Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and Melville’s matchless Moby Dick. \nHere is Barth’s opening sentence: “In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy\, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke\, more ambitious than talented\, and yet more talented than prudent\, who\, like his friends-in-folly\, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge\, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over\, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship\, had learned the knack of versifying\, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day\, afroth with Joves and Jupiters\, aclang with jarring rhymes\, and string-taught with similes stretched to the snapping point.” \nThis Cooke does as an early settler\, bounding from London cafes to the “wilds” of Maryland\, in this novel depicting the consciousness\, in mid-20th century post-modernism\, the colonizing beings early on inhabiting the North American contenent. \nSet in New York and China\, The Leavers is a vivid examination of borders and belonging. It’s a moving story of how a boy comes into his own when everything he loves is taken away\, and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of the past. \nOne morning\, Deming Guo’s mother\, Polly\, an undocumented Chinese immigrant\, goes to her job at a nail salon—and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her. With his mother gone\, eleven-year-old Deming is left mystified and bereft. Eventually adopted by a pair of well-meaning white professors\, Deming is moved from the Bronx to a small town upstate and renamed Daniel Wilkinson. But far from all he’s ever known\, Daniel struggles to reconcile his adoptive parents’ desire that he assimilate with his memories of his mother and the community he left behind. \nTold from the perspective of both Daniel—as he grows into a directionless young man—and Polly\, Ko’s novel gives us one of fiction’s most singular mothers. Loving and selfish\, determined and frightened\, Polly is forced to make one heart-wrenching choice after another. \nUpcoming terms will include the following: William Gass\, Middle C\, Maxine Hong Kingston\,Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book\, Ishmael Reed\, Mumbo Jumbo\, Russell Banks\, Cloudsplitter\, Jeffrey Eugenides\, Middlesex\, Gina Apostol\, Insurrecto and more.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/american-writing-changing-locations/2020-03-05/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:American Literature,Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Lit_ChangingLocale_Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20200227T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20200227T213000
DTSTAMP:20200129T031424Z
CREATED:20191231T140728Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200129T031424Z
UID:10006115-1582831800-1582839000@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:American Writing: Changing Locations
DESCRIPTION:American Writing: 4 Seasons \nSeason 1: Changing Places in America\nHerman Melville\,  The Confidence-Man (1857). John Barth\, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) Lisa Ko\, The Leavers (2017) \nIn his 1970 essay “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction\,” William Gass brought the term “metafiction” forward to the reading public as a way to characterize the work writers such as Borges\, Barth\, Flann O’Brien\, as well as the type of novels Gass himself would write. He described metafiction as writing “in which the forms of fiction serve as the material upon which further forms can be imposed”. Does metafiction provide escape for the committed writer from the bourgeois strictures that the novel form imposes? As critical readers we need to check out all the angles. The metafiction form will over time become incorporated as yet another aspect of modern fiction as ultimately there is no way to over-ride what happens when ink is committed to paper\, impulses to the interactive screen. \nAmerican fiction writers have lots to write about. We are introducing a four term look at writing by American authors who have novels appropriate to four themes important to critical thinkers of the broad American questions on nation\, class\, race and gender. Much of this fiction becomes part of what our unfolding reality is as a nation\, group of nations\, as aspiring internationalists. Many of the fictional works we will read are not as formally postmodern or would formally fall in the metafiction category as delineated by Barth. \nOur first thematic 12 week term concerns Change of Place. \nThis first session will begin with Melville. Though centered around the title character\, Melville’s The Confidence-Man portrays passengers on a steamboat with stories that are told as they travel to New Orleans down the Mississippi River. The narrative structure is reminiscent the Canterbury Tales.The novel is written as cultural satire\, and metaphysical treatise\, and deals with a number of themes including sincerity\, economic dislocation and materialism\, identity\, cynicism\, and more.Many critics have placed The Confidence-Man alongside Moby Dick and “Bartleby\, the Scrivener”  as precursors to 20th-century literary preoccupations around nihilism\, the absurd and existentialism. \nDale Jones citing R. W. B. Lewis\, who feels the necessity of defining a new genre for [The Confidence- Man] and its literary descendants: “it is the recognizable and awe-inspiring ancestor of several subse- quent works of fiction in America: Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger\, Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust\, Faulkner’s The Hamlet\, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man\, John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor\, Thomas Pynchon’s V. Melville bequeathed to those works . . . the vision of an apocalypse that is no less terrible for being enormously comic\, the self-extinction of a world characterized by deceit and thronging with imposters and masqueraders…” \nA worthy contender for the title of Great American Novel\, Barth’s masterpiece is a work of astonishing virtuosity and range to some. Others look at this\, as did the author himself\, as the end of the novel as known before it’s publication. Barth had changed midstream in the writing of The Sot-Weed Factor. Among American novels\, in terms of sheer linguistic brilliance\, it is surpassed only by Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and Melville’s matchless Moby Dick. \nHere is Barth’s opening sentence: “In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy\, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke\, more ambitious than talented\, and yet more talented than prudent\, who\, like his friends-in-folly\, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge\, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over\, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship\, had learned the knack of versifying\, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day\, afroth with Joves and Jupiters\, aclang with jarring rhymes\, and string-taught with similes stretched to the snapping point.” \nThis Cooke does as an early settler\, bounding from London cafes to the “wilds” of Maryland\, in this novel depicting the consciousness\, in mid-20th century post-modernism\, the colonizing beings early on inhabiting the North American contenent. \nSet in New York and China\, The Leavers is a vivid examination of borders and belonging. It’s a moving story of how a boy comes into his own when everything he loves is taken away\, and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of the past. \nOne morning\, Deming Guo’s mother\, Polly\, an undocumented Chinese immigrant\, goes to her job at a nail salon—and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her. With his mother gone\, eleven-year-old Deming is left mystified and bereft. Eventually adopted by a pair of well-meaning white professors\, Deming is moved from the Bronx to a small town upstate and renamed Daniel Wilkinson. But far from all he’s ever known\, Daniel struggles to reconcile his adoptive parents’ desire that he assimilate with his memories of his mother and the community he left behind. \nTold from the perspective of both Daniel—as he grows into a directionless young man—and Polly\, Ko’s novel gives us one of fiction’s most singular mothers. Loving and selfish\, determined and frightened\, Polly is forced to make one heart-wrenching choice after another. \nUpcoming terms will include the following: William Gass\, Middle C\, Maxine Hong Kingston\,Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book\, Ishmael Reed\, Mumbo Jumbo\, Russell Banks\, Cloudsplitter\, Jeffrey Eugenides\, Middlesex\, Gina Apostol\, Insurrecto and more.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/american-writing-changing-locations/2020-02-27/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:American Literature,Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Lit_ChangingLocale_Site.jpg
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR