Scarsdale Adult School Catalog Fall/Winter 2024-25
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
Book Discussion: Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre 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
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