NYRSeminars: James Baldwin, ‘Giovanni’s Room’
In Baldwin’s 1956 basic a couple of repressed American man who strikes to Paris to be able to stay his complicated sexuality extra freely—a trajectory that mimics the one adopted by Baldwin himself—the characters’ stressed journeying between cities, continents, and cultures turns into a metaphor for a striving after emotional liberation. David, a closeted bisexual with profound anxieties about masculinity, flees the Brooklyn of his childhood and adolescence for France, the place he oscillates between affairs with girls and a romance with a doomed Italian waiter: Giovanni, whose darkened room is each a spot of stillness and security and, lastly, an emblem of David’s incapacity to combine his sexuality efficiently.
Schedule
Three Wednesdays: February 7, 14, 21
About “Journeys”
Tales of thrilling—and infrequently perilous—journeys away from house have been a staple of storytelling ever since Homer’s Odyssey launched the determine of the wandering hero to Western Literature. On this sequence of 5 weekly seminars, Daniel Mendelsohn, the New York Overview’s EditoratGiant, will lead individuals by means of readings of 5 works by which journeys and voyages turn into automobiles for exploring the self and the world, language and artwork, time and mortality. The primary seminar, dedicated to the Odyssey itself—the mannequin in so some ways for all subsequent journey writing within the European custom—might be adopted by 4 seminars dedicated to twentiethcentury works by Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, W. G. Sebald, and Rachel Cusk. Conferences will take the type of each lectures with Q&A classes and extra intimate online seminars by which Mendelsohn, after delivering opening remarks and observations, will invite individuals to a wider dialogue.
Chances are you’ll learn descriptions of all 5 seminars right here.
About Daniel Mendelsohn
Daniel Mendelsohn, the EditoratGiant of The New York Overview of Books, is an awardwinning critic, creator, essayist, and translator. His books embrace An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic and three collections of essays and opinions, together with Ready for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Tradition and Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Sport of Thrones, each printed by New York Overview Books. Mr. Mendelsohn is the Charles Ranlet Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard Faculty and the Director of the Robert B. Silvers Basis, a charitable belief that helps writers of nonfiction, essay, and criticism.
In Baldwin’s 1956 basic a couple of repressed American man who strikes to Paris to be able to stay his complicated sexuality extra freely—a trajectory that mimics the one adopted by Baldwin himself—the characters’ stressed journeying between cities, continents, and cultures turns into a metaphor for a striving after emotional liberation. David, a closeted bisexual with profound anxieties about masculinity, flees the Brooklyn of his childhood and adolescence for France, the place he oscillates between affairs with girls and a romance with a doomed Italian waiter: Giovanni, whose darkened room is each a spot of stillness and security and, lastly, an emblem of David’s incapacity to combine his sexuality efficiently.
Schedule
Three Wednesdays: February 7, 14, 21
About “Journeys”
Tales of thrilling—and infrequently perilous—journeys away from house have been a staple of storytelling ever since Homer’s Odyssey launched the determine of the wandering hero to Western Literature. On this sequence of 5 weekly seminars, Daniel Mendelsohn, the New York Overview’s EditoratGiant, will lead individuals by means of readings of 5 works by which journeys and voyages turn into automobiles for exploring the self and the world, language and artwork, time and mortality. The primary seminar, dedicated to the Odyssey itself—the mannequin in so some ways for all subsequent journey writing within the European custom—might be adopted by 4 seminars dedicated to twentiethcentury works by Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, W. G. Sebald, and Rachel Cusk. Conferences will take the type of each lectures with Q&A classes and extra intimate online seminars by which Mendelsohn, after delivering opening remarks and observations, will invite individuals to a wider dialogue.
Chances are you’ll learn descriptions of all 5 seminars right here.
About Daniel Mendelsohn
Daniel Mendelsohn, the EditoratGiant of The New York Overview of Books, is an awardwinning critic, creator, essayist, and translator. His books embrace An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic and three collections of essays and opinions, together with Ready for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Tradition and Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Sport of Thrones, each printed by New York Overview Books. Mr. Mendelsohn is the Charles Ranlet Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard Faculty and the Director of the Robert B. Silvers Basis, a charitable belief that helps writers of nonfiction, essay, and criticism.