This Newberry Seminar is now concluded. It was held in the fall of 2017. Daniel Deronda, George Eliot’s final novel, is ambitious, challenging, and astonishingly multi-dimensional. Eliot’s tale weaves together a provocative examination of marriage and personal aspiration with a meditation on Jewishness in Victorian Britain. This seminar invites participants to immerse themselves in the […]
This Newberry Seminar is now concluded. It was held in the spring of 2017. This seminar explores two of Edith Wharton’s most important novels—The House of Mirth (1905) and her Pulitzer-Prize winning The Age of Innocence (1920). We will spend several sessions on each novel, allowing for an in-depth and appreciative look into Wharton’s literary […]
This Newberry Seminar is now concluded. It was held in the fall of 2016. Our Mutual Friend is Charles Dickens’s last completed novel, filled with humor, dark satire, multiple plotlines, and remarkable prose. This seminar considers the book in serial weekly installments (no spoilers) for an engaging in-depth look at Dickens’s literary craft, social criticism, […]
This Newberry Library seminar is now concluded. It was held in the spring of 2016. This seminar invites you to watch and discuss twelve international masterpieces of the silent film era, all while exploring the proposition that silent movies are much more than simply “movies without sound”—they comprise instead a distinct art form. By exploring […]
This Newberry Seminar is now concluded. It was held in the fall of 2015. George Eliot’s celebrated Victorian masterpiece Middlemarch can be daunting to approach. This seminar presents the novel in manageable weekly installments (with no spoilers!) supplemented with shorter works of literature, art, and film. The result is an engaging in-depth look at Eliot’s […]