Literary Studies
Antiquity Now: 3 Robert Graves Novels
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYTo bring the dead to life
Is no great magic.
Few are wholly dead:
Blow on a dead man’s embers
And a live flame will start.
Let his forgotten griefs be now,
And now his withered hopes;
Subdue your pen to his handwriting
Until it prove as natural
To sign his name as yours…
—To Bring the Dead to Life, Robert Graves
6 Plays of Bertolt Brecht
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsBeginning April 23 we will read aloud six of the many plays Bertolt Brecht wrote between the 1920s and his death in 1956. The six plays are The Threepenny Opera, The Mother, The Exception and The Rule, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Good Person of Szechuan and The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui. There will be time to read aloud—taking on various characters among ourselves. There will also be substantive discussion of these works which span all the decades of his writing. The Epic theater, musical theater along with the learning plays are represented in this selection of plays. Each session will be conducted via Zoom until we have an all-clear to return to the classroom. With your registration, the zoom password will be sent to you.
Lit and Film: Noir for the Summer of Covid-19
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsContinuing in the MEP LITERATURE GROUP summer tradition, we will once again delve into Noir genres– but with a twist! Starting August 6, we will read four books and watch the movies that are based on them. Please join us for four books with the four movies that resulted from them.
Multi-Month Pass: Now through Dec 31, 2020
All VenuesFor a one-time sliding scale fee of $150, $200, or $250 attend any and all classes and events of The Marxist Education Project. For $50 more ($200, $250 or $300) bring a guest as often as you would like to the classes, films and events between now and May 31, 2021.
Trotsky in Tijuana: A new novel by Dan La Botz
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWho was the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky? What did he believe and do? What was his legacy? Dan La Botz’s new novel. Trotsky in Tijuana, examines these questions in fiction.The novel’s premise is that Trotsky was not assassinated in August 1940 but survived and was relocated to Tijuana where he lived on until 1953 dying on the same day as his rival and political opponent Joseph Stalin.
Women Write Against Fascism
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWe will look at themes around resistance and collaboration. Beauvoir and Ginzburg write of the period occupation by the Nazis in Vichy France and the period of Mussolini's fascist dictatorship in Italy, while Jelinek's Wonderful Wonderful Times describes the lingering effects naziism had during the years of recovery from the fascist years in Austria in society and within a family.
4 Month Pass:
All VenuesFor 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 more ($100, $150 or $200) bring a guest as often as you would like to the classes, and events between now and May 31, 2021.
M.A.D. Lit 101: American Fiction and the Cold War
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsA reading and discussion of three substantive novels that explain the context of anti-communism as it raged in the years immediately following World War II, has continued throughout the decades since then, and remains strong throughout American culture and popular consciousness today.
Working Class Cinema in the Age of Digital Capitalism
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWhy does the story of cinema begin with the end of work? Is it because, as has been suggested, it is impossible to represent work from the perspective of labor but only from the point of view of capital, because the revolutionary horizon of the working class coincides with the end of work? After all, the early revolutionary art avant-garde had an ambiguous relationship with capitalism: it provided both a critique of commodification while also reproducing the commodity form.
Jesus Christ: Prince of Peace or King of Swords with Shane Mage
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe Gospels...have absolutely no presumptive value as history. But neither are they pure fiction despite the patent absurdity of the whole Christian theology built upon them and their obviously falsified passages (especially the blood-libel of Jewish Deicide) designed to justify the inherently antisemitic nature of that Christian theology.
Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg: Reconsidering Primitive Accumulation
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThis session will be devoted to engaging with Rosa’s pivotal reworking of the concept of primitive accumulation, with attention to historical and contemporary South Africa, medieval European race-making and its legacies, and contemporary commodification of women’s reproductive labor.
New York City and the Experience of Modernity
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThis is a seminar about New York City and its people. It is not a study of architectural styles and objects, - although the physical stuff of cities does play a role -, but it is a course about the experience of the way in which modernity builds and destroys cities.
Modernity is a historical force. It is messy. In architecture history modernity is usually narrated as an interplay between the combined forces of the Industrial Revolution and capital, with social upheaval, explosive population growth and immigration as its result...
Matters of State: Literature & Espionage
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWHY SPY NOVELS? Spy 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.
Darko Suvin: Communism, Poetry, Comradeship—a celebratory reading and discussion
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsDarko Suvin will appear on the eve of his 91st birthday via an international video conference presented by The Marxist Education Project, in celebration of a life of communism, poetry, comradeship and all that goes into a life well-known for commitment to all of this and more. Readings and discussion: A selection of poems from Darko’s more than 40 years of writing poetry along with sharing memoirs of many more years of vigorous engagement while active in the multiple forms of struggle for communism from continents the world over that Darko has called home, will all be part of this mid-summer celebration a life of comradeship.