This group will meet every weeks to discuss books from the Western Canon of Literature in parallel with literary or cultural critics. For instance a reading of Jameson's "The Political Unconscious" along with 1984
Authors will include: Keats, Milton, NOT Blake, Shakespeare, Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, Joan Didion, Michael Herr's Dispatches (Viet Nam Literature), Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Robinson Jeffers, James Baldwin, DEFINTELY Nabokov, Twain and if you want Ken Kesey. Gulag Archipelago, Conrad and Virgil. Judas by Amos Oz, Defoe, Marlowe, A Walker in the City by Alfred Kazin. And Finally Raymond Carver. Almost forgot---F. Scott Fitzgerald. Mallarme, Balzac, Dreisser.
An ambitious proposal: Big Money by John Dos Passos along with "The Road to Serfdom" by F.A. Hayek
Amongst the critical and philosophical readings that will be introduced: Susan Sontag, Hayden White, Giorgio Agamben, Lacan, Derrida, I'll try to secure some books by Helen Vendler at Haravrd on both The Odes by Keats and on the poetry of Wallce Stevens, THe Souls of Black Folk by WEB Du Bois, The New Negro edited by Alain Locke, Gadamer, Lucien Goldman, Derrida, Hannah Arendt, Fussel's The Great War, Walter Benjamin, Lacan, William James, James Hillman and Bachelard to accompany Ovid if you want. Mikhail Bakhtin (Polyphonic Novel). Raymond Williams. Harvard Professor Elaine Scarry "The Body in Pain
Open to men and women, all ages. I'd like to make the group comfortable for people who don't have means enough for a University but the group will always lean in a scholarly or substantially intellectual direction.