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Daniel Mendelsohn’s third seminar in his “Unrequited Love” series will be devoted to Jane Austen’s final—and, for some of us, most profound novel, Persuasion (1817). Austen’s delicate study of amorous misunderstandings and second chances afforded to more mature characters—the 27-year-old Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth, the man she had rejected years earlier—marks an interesting shift from her previous novels, and allows us to shift our focus from male authors’ idealization (and, often, fetishization) of female love objects by looking at “love gone wrong” through the point of view of an intelligent woman of profound sensibility.
Three one-hour sessions: November 4, 11, and 18. All sessions will start at 7 PM EST. Memberships begin at $99 (excluding Eventbrite fees). Full members and auditors will have access to recordings of each session that may be viewed after the live sessions conclude.
Other Upcoming Seminars Led by Daniel Mendelsohn
The Golden Bowl is Henry James’s last major novel, part of a great flowering of his work that took place in the very first years of the twentieth century, work that also included The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove. Of the three books, The Golden Bowl is the most intense, the most densely written. The flickering of consciousness and the subtlety of response in the book cannot be easily summarized. The story of Adam Verver and his daughter Maggie is rendered with complex tones, using many patterns and a language of infinite suggestion and layered nuance.
Colm Tóibín is is the author of twelve novels and three collections of stories. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. His novel The Master, which dramatizes the life of Henry James, won the Los Angeles Times Novel of the Year Award, the Dublin IMPAC prize, the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Stonewall Book Award. He is Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University.
Five one-hour sessions: January 4, 11, 18, 25, and February 1. All sessions will start at 7 PM EST. Memberships begin at $149 (excluding Eventbrite fees). Full members and auditors will have access to recordings of each session that may be viewed after the live sessions conclude.
Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens’s last completed novel, may be his most astounding book, a panoramic view of Victorian society, its overlords and its underworlds, all gripped tight in the dead hand of new money. Speculation and peculation, blackmail and bribery, scrounging, conniving, hoarding, and begging are unending in a book in which corruption is the order of the day and nothing’s not for sale. But Our Mutual Friend is also an exorbitant, exuberant showpiece, a carousel of characters and stories and different kinds of storytelling, with mystery, melodrama, murder, and marriage (for better or for worse) all featuring in a book that combines grittiest realism with fairy tale wonder.
Is Dickens simply pouring out his whole bag of authorial tricks here or, in a book that is as death-haunted as it is outraged and weird, is he venturing onto new imaginative ground? The seminar, led by Edwin Frank, Editor of the New York Review Books Classics series, will take Our Mutual Friend apart and put it back together, the better to consider what this great strange book is about and what it means today.
Five one-hour sessions: March 3, 10, 17, 24, and 31. All sessions will start at 7 PM EST/EDT. Memberships begin at $149 (excluding Eventbrite fees). Full members and auditors will have access to recordings of each session that may be viewed after the live sessions conclude.
Why is Toni Morrison’s masterpiece, Beloved (1987), a ghost story? Why would the future Nobel Laureate use a haunted house story—with its campy, Halloweeny vibe—to depict a subject as devastating as American slavery? In this course, we will discuss how this neo-slave narrative originated as an act of raising the dead, of historical revivification: it retells a story from the nineteenth century in which a fugitive from slavery, Margaret Garner, committed infanticide rather than see her children be enslaved. We will then turn to what writing a work of black Gothic fiction afforded Morrison at the level of aesthetics and philosophy.
Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer and a Professor of English at Harvard University. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction, a Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction, a Caine Prize for African Writing, and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her work of criticism, On Morrison, is a national bestseller.
Four one-hour sessions: April 7, 14, 21, 28. All sessions will start at 7 PM EDT. Memberships begin at $119 (excluding Eventbrite fees). Full members and auditors will have access to recordings of each session that may be viewed after the live sessions conclude.
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