Scarsdale Adult School Catalog Fall/Winter 2024-25
Book Discussion: Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov (1859), a Superfluous Man
We all know "Oblomov" types — people who have great promises but who seem to never achieve anything, seldom leave their home, and never take concerted action. Ivan Goncharov's 1859 novel paints Oblomov as a "superfluous man," somebody who is paralyzed both by his own imperfection and those of an autocratic Russian society. In reading Marian Schwartz's Yale University Press translation, see how Goncharov foreshadows the achievements of his younger contemporaries, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. NICHOLAS BIRNS (see bio for “Book Discussion: The Rainbow (1915) by D.H. Lawrence, a Modernist Family Saga”). 2 Sessions, starting Thursday, December 5 • 10:30am-12:00pm • Zoom • Course 12777 • $70
Book Discussion: Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878), the Ultimate Novel of Men and Women
Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is the great novel of love, marriage, adultery, and family love. It can be described as the greatest example of “the fiction of men and women.” Containing three major plot strands and hundreds of characters and situations, the novel portrays a Russia torn between self improvement and military intervention in other countries, characters torn between the circumstances of their own lives and a quest for something more, and a writer torn between the entertainment provided by the novel form and a more declarative moral mission. Please use the Penguin edition, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. NICHOLAS BIRNS (see bio for “Book Discussion: The Rainbow (1915) by D.H. Lawrence, a Modernist Family Saga”). 5 Sessions, starting Thursday, February 6 • 10:30am-12:00pm • Zoom • Course 12952 • $150 Book Discussion: D. H. Lawrence’s Women In Love (1920), Sisters and Husbands D. H. Lawrence’s Women In Love features two sisters from rural England, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, who marry two very different men, the introspective intellectual Rupert Birkin and the ruthless industrialist Gerald Crich. In following these characters from English landed estates to Alpine mountain fastnesses, from antagonism to friendship, and from love to tragedy, Lawrence examines the changing mores of the modern world and, in particular, how the relations between men and women change in the twentieth century. NICHOLAS BIRNS (see bio for “Book Discussion: The Rainbow (1915) by D.H. Lawrence, a Modernist Family Saga”). 2 Sessions, starting Thursday, March 20 • 10:30am-12:00pm • Zoom • Course 12953 • $60
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