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Classical Pursuits

Past Toronto Pursuits Seminars

 

Summer seminars for 2007
July 15–20, 2007

  1. The Play's the Thing: Julius Caesar & Coriolanus
  2. The Book of Genesis
  3. J.S. Bach: St. Mathew Passion
  4. Goethe: Faust
  5. David Batchelor: Chromophobia
  6. Herman Melville: Moby Dick
  7. Tolstoy: Anna Karenina
  8. Naguib Mahfouz: Children of the Alley
  9. Jazz, Blues, and Gospel: Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison
  10. The Art and Science of Leonardo Da Vinci
  11. Keeping the Peace: Conversations with Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  12. Grace Under Pressure: Iranian Cinema

 

Summer seminars for 2005

  1. The Aeneid, by Virgil
  2. Myth, Mind, and Make-Believe: selected works by C.G. Jung and Joseph Campbell
  3. Paradise Lost, by John Milton
  4. The Play's the Thing - King Lear and Long Day's Journey into Night            
  5. Reading Dillard, Reading the World: The Phenomenon of Man, by Teilhard de Chardin and For the Time Being, by Annie Dillard
  6. Democracy in America, by Alexis DeTocqueville
  7. Madam Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert
  8. Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray
  9. Tristan und Isolde, by Richard Wagner
  10. The Music of War            
  11. The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing, by James Elkins
  12. La Dolce Vita, by Federico Fellini

 

Summer seminars for 2004

  1. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens
  2. Words with Power, by Northrup Frye
  3. The Iliad, by Homer and war poetry
  4. The Metamorphoses, by Ovid
  5. Job
  6. Russian short stories
  7. The Decalogue, by Krzysztof Kieslowski  
  8. The Play's the Thing: Sophocles's Antigone, Shakespeare's Macbeth, and Chekhov's Uncle Vanya.
  9. Gotterdammerung, by Richard Wagner
  10. Mass in B-Minor, by J.S. Bach
  11. A Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  12. The Poetics of Space, by Gaston Bachelard

 

Summer Seminars for 2003

  1. Bioethics: What to do until the PhD comes
  2. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens
  3. Die Walkure, by Richard Wagner
  4. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  5. Gustav Mahler - The Man, Music, Mystique and Myth
  6. Keeping Things Whole: Man in the Biosphere
  7. Looking at Art with your Heart
  8. The Play's the Thing
  9. Leadership in the Hebrew Bible

 

Summer Seminars for 2002

  1. The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer
  2. The Brothers Karamozov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  3. Selected works of Flannery O'Connor
  4. A Modern Pas de Deux: a selection of music, art and literature
  5. Die Meistersinger, by Richard Wagner
  6. Dr. Faustus, by Thomas Mann
  7. The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco
  8. The Idea of Desire (selected readings)
  9. Myth and Belief

 

Summer Seminars for 2001

  1. The Odyssey, by Homer
  2. Four visions of the Rennaissance: Machiavelli's The Prince , Giorgio Vasari's "Life of Michelangelo" from Lives of the Artists, Michelangelo's ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and Josquin Desprez's Missa de Beata Virgine
  3. Shakespeare's Othello and Verdi's Otello
  4. Middlemarch, by George Elliott
  5. The Deptford Trilogy, by Robertson Davies
  6. Civilization and its Discontents, by Sigmund Freud
  7. The Soul Of the Text - A Selection of Jewish Writing Across Time and Place

 

Summer Seminars for 2000

  1. Don Giovanni, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
  2. Confessions, by Saint Augustine
  3. Purgatorio, by Dante Allegieri
  4. Death in Venice; novella by Thomas Mann, opera by Benjamin Britten, film by Luchino Visconti
  5. Don Quixote, by Cervantes
  6. Thus Spake Zarathustra, by Frederick Nietzsche

 

Summer Seminars for 1999

  1. Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  2. Tristan und Isolde, by Richard Wagner
  3. Inferno, by Dante Allegieri
  4. The Republic, by Plato

 

Virginia Woolf

 

Faust

 

Anna Karenina

 

Image

 

Moby Dick

 

Okeeffe

 

rembrandt