Scarsdale Adult School Catalog Fall/Winter 2024-25
Book Discussion: JaneEyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë
Charlotte Brontë's JaneEyre is one of the most celebrated and influential novels ever written, and its heroine/narrator one of the most beloved of all fictional creations. This extraordinary novel functions as a kind of retrospective fictional autobiography as it recasts and revises two earlier novels (Richardson's Pamela and Austen's Pride and Prejudice ), grapples with the legacy of Romanticism, and fits into the gothic tradition. Also consider Jane Eyre as a proto feminist heroine. Recommended is the Oxford World’s Classics edition but any other will work. Before the first class, read through the end of Chapter 9; for week 2: finish volume 1; for week 3: read volume 2; for week 4: read volume 3. PRISCILLA GILMAN is a former professor of English literature at Yale University and Vassar College and the author of two acclaimed memoirs, The Anti-Romantic Child (Harper 2011) and The Critic’s Daughter (Norton 2023), a best book of 2023 for the Washington Post and a New York Times’ Book Critics’ Favorite Book of 2023. She teaches literature classes for Yale Alumni College, leads book groups, and is a sought-after speaker about literature, education, and the arts. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times , the Washington Post , the Boston Globe , O: The Oprah Magazine , Slate , the Daily Beast , MORE , Redbook , and Real Simple .
4 Sessions, starting Thursday, October 24 • 1:00pm-2:30pm • Zoom • Course 12786 • $200
Shylock, Barabas, and Antisemitism Christopher Marlowe’s popular, bloody play, The Jew of Malta (1592), led to Shakespeare’s popular The Merchant of Venice five years later. Barabas and Shylock are prosperous investment bankers in mercantile societies that value their services but despise them because they are Jewish. How they conduct themselves and why, and how they are viewed and treated by others, is the context for this regrettably timely discussion. Were these plays antisemitic when presented in Elizabethan England, from which Jews had been banned for 300 years? Are both plays now antisemitic? Is Shakespeare? How do we arrive at such judgments about literary works? Examine texts and history. The Jew of Malta is available online at https://www.owleyes.org/text/jew-malta and in print (Norton); a summary will be provided. Please use Folger Shakespeare Library's 2010 edition of The Merchant of Venice , editors Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine; video clips will also be provided. ROBERT HERMANN spends the best part of his summers in the
post-graduate Shakespeare program at Cambridge University and leads courses for SAS during the academic year on Shakespeare's plays. He majored in English, received a BA from Dartmouth College and an LLB from Yale Law School, and has been practicing in the field of litigation, public interest law, and governmental law for many years in addition to teaching at NYU Law School. 4 Sessions, starting Wednesday, October 16 • 10:00am-11:30am • Zoom • Course 12780 • $120
www.ScarsdaleAdultSchool.org • (914) 723-2325
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