Steven J. Venturino

A Serial Reading of Middlemarch

Published on September 28, 2015May 19, 2020 by Steven J. Venturino

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 literary technique as well as her insights into culture, science, art, and psychology. Nine sessions.

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Six Revelations Provoked by Theater-Screening The Wizard of Oz

Published on January 16, 2015May 19, 2020 by Steven J. Venturino

Oh you can say there’s nothing to be gained by seeing The Wizard of Oz on the big screen of a real theater, and you can say we knew all these things before, and you can say a big screen at home is big enough for anything we want to see. But with the principle in mind that knowledge of something from a little picture is different from knowledge of that same thing from a big picture, and in the spirit of refreshing the familiar, here are just six thoughts I had while watching, for the first time in a theater, a movie we’ve all seen dozens of times before.