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A Four-Course Series by Michael Tingley

The Infinity of Literature

In an interview late in his career, Cormac McCarthy solemnly noted, “The ugly fact is books are made of other books.” This course series proposes to look long at this ‘ugly fact’ with the promise that, since each selection is ‘made of’ the last, our reading will generate new ideas about the masterpieces. We'll go together on four expeditions--to the British heath, to hell, to unmarked seas, to the evening redness in the West--to track the slanting lights of evil; political turmoil; religious apostasy; ragged ambition; operatic madness; artistic influence; the infinite unconcealing of literature. ​​

Course 1: Lear Among the Ruins
"Lear Among the Ruins" is the first of a four-part series that includes readings of King Lear, Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and Blood Meridian.
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September 14 - October 5 (4 weeks) | Thursdays, 7-9pm ET
​online via Zoom
Instructor: Michael Tingley

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About "Lear Among the Ruins: An Introduction to the Infinity of Literature"

Our study of the infinity of literature begins with a somewhat prismatic look at Shakespeare’s King Lear. As a piece of theater both rooted in history and with the staying power of a modern artifact, the play—in some sense—is a “living” work; it has been performed across centuries, across continents, across political divides.

This course is designed both for new readers and re-readers of Shakespeare. The rigor of this course lies not in the simple reading of King Lear, but in the consistent re-imagining of the full text through various “lenses”: the familial, political, theatrical, and moral. For each of the four sessions, we will come having read (or re-read) the entirety of the play through a specific lens, and suggested films and scholarly articles will be paired with that particular interpretive experience. Each recursion will complicate the previous theme and make the next topic inconceivably broad--that’s how we'll know we’re thinking clearly. 

This course is a lot of Lear; however, readers will leave with new insights into the play, the period, and one of the greatest wielders of the English language.

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A Nine-Session Series by Sakina B. Fakhri

Virginia Woolf in Poetic Echoes

Session 1: The Voyage Out: Virginia Woolf in Poetic Echoes
Sunday, September 24 | 2:00-4:00pm ET 
online via Zoom
​Instructor: Sakina B. Fakhri
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"The Voyage Out: Virginia Woolf in Poetic Echoes" is the first in a nine-session* series that moves chronologically through the novels of Virginia Woolf. Each discussion includes a presentation and analysis of supplementary excerpts--"echoes"--from works of poets & writers throughout history.
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*purchase each session individually

Literary Focus
We will discuss the genesis of Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out, in relation to its arguably far more unbridled--more poetic, more scathing, more experimental--first draft: Melymbrosia, the unpublished novel written by the yet-unmarried Virginia Stephen. Did Woolf already achieve in Melymbrosia the experimentally lyrical technique (one that was "polished" out of her work for publishers of The Voyage Out) that she struggled for nearly half her life to recreate in The Waves? Why does The Voyage Out read, to some, as more muted and timid than the essays and personal letters that Woolf wrote at the very same time? Together, we will look at slashed semicolons; expunged boldnesses.

To probe the relationship between musicality and verbal/literary expression set forth thematically in this novel and put into practice in later novels, we will look at Woolf's essays "Street Music", "On Not Knowing Greek", and others.
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​Style: Performative/Analytical/Immersive
Whether you are able to read the novel on your own or not, feel free to join us! Amidst a patchwork atmosphere wrought by live music, voice actors, and sketch artists documenting the session in real time, we will be doing close readings of passages and rigorously analyzing the poetic craft therein.

The Voyage Out: Virginia Woolf in Poetic Echoes

Register

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About "Virginia Woolf in Poetic Echoes" Series

Imagine you stand in a concert hall as a grand symphony draws to a close; the percussive clash that could once be felt in the bones falls slowly into memoriam, silence now measured in motes of dust. The scene continues to change—the walls fall to disrepair, are encouraged by fresh brick; the grand chandelier, now replaced, reflects the light just quite differently; the azure clouds of Aphrodite are lathered in lush pastoral abstractness, a scene beautiful in its own way… but, wait… there, on the ceiling… is that a hint--a glimmer--of the paint beneath the paint?

If symphonies once played in this grand hall could be heard perpetually, oh, the din they would make! But if an ear could learn to hear these frequencies from different time periods all at once—symphonies played forever, old upon new and new upon old—the volume of each modulated to just the right balance, layered atop one another… if this were possible, would this room not behold quite the overture?

This is the chronological journey we will take through the novels of Virginia Woolf. We will discuss one novel every other Sunday; our fulcrum will be The Waves—how those that came before contain the seeds of it, how those that follow contain its echoes. Our study of poetic echoes within Woolf will not stop with Woolf, however; we will look at excerpts of Chaucer, passages of Proust—poetry old and new--to see if we can discern in Woolf’s language the enrichment of past symphonies.

We will study some of Woolf’s diary entries and non-fiction writings alongside parts of other writers’ works that she purportedly read at the time of each novel’s composition. Our focus will be the way in which these lyrical echoes carry out the emotional tenor of Woolf’s genius.

More courses coming soon!​

• Romantic Poetry
• Bleak House (Charles Dickens)
• James Baldwin
• Decoloniality
• T.S. Eliot (poetry and plays)
• Scathing literary criticism essays of the 1800s (Charles Swinburne, etc.)