September 2019
Les Temps Modernes: The Early Decades
This class will examine the first decades of its existence, when such important works as Sartre’s What is Literature appeared in it, as well as the first installments of Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. It will focus on its political positions, as Sartre first attempted to set up a third-way party...
Find out more »A Summer of Further Discontent: Noir Fiction and the City
This summer our noir group will visit our old stomping grounds of Los Angeles but will begin our summer of more discontent with Narcopolis, set in Mumbai, then after two stops in L.A. go off to Glasgow before dipping south to finish our summer in Paris with the soon-to-be-published Nada.
Find out more »Earth in Crisis: Staying With the Trouble
This reading group will consider how climate activists and critical thinkers can maintain equilibrium and avoid despair by “staying with the trouble” —Donna Haraway’s phrase for living through planetary chaos and struggling alongside our fellow human and nonhuman beings.
Find out more »October 2019
Antiquity Now: 3 Robert Graves Novels
To 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