What Does It Mean to Write a Life? David Saussy on Hamilton
Hamilton. Many love it. Some just hate it. I’m one of those who love it. And my kids love it too. I love the big thesis of the show that you don’t have to look like the founding fathers (that is, be white) to learn from and be inspired by […]
Narrative Magic: Interview with Wendy O’Brien
Since Classical Pursuits went online at the beginning of the pandemic, leader and philosopher Wendy O’Brien has been nothing of short of a force of nature. She’s led seminars on Montaigne, 20th-century women painters, and much more. Her latest seminar is on Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel Atonement. This novel went […]
Language That Keeps Us Here: Interview with Hunter Dunn
We are happy to bring dramatic works, long a part of Classical Pursuits, to our online seminars. English teacher, improv actor and longtime Classical Pursuits leader Hunter Dunn is pairing two giants of 20th-century theatre, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Endgame. These plays, so stripped-down in setting and plot, […]
Richard Wright’s Unflinching Eye
Today Classical Pursuits talks with John Riley, who is leading our upcoming seminar on two short story collections by the hugely influential Richard Wright. Largely self-taught, Wright became part of the Federal Writer’s Project in 1932. The success of Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) led to a Guggenheim Fellowship that helped […]
A Spirited Study of Shakespeare
Upon that night, when fairies light On Cassilis Downans dance, Or owre the lays, in splendid blaze, On sprightly coursers prance; Or for Colean the route is ta’en, Beneath the moon’s pale beams; There, up the cove, to stray and rove, Among the rocks and streams To sport that night. […]
In Uncharted Lands: Talking Jazz Age Creativity with Denise Ahlquist
You are in for a multi-sensory treat with our new online seminar Self on the Line: The Multimedia Psyche of the Jazz Age. Classical Pursuits executive director Melanie Blake recently talked with creator and leader Denise Ahlquist about what you can expect in this seminar, a Classical Pursuits exclusive. Melanie […]
Key Artists of Renaissance Florence
Join us Thursday, March 26 at 2 p.m. Eastern/noon Central/11 a.m. Pacific for a FREE virtual tour of the Gallerie degli Uffizi and other major sites of Renaissance Florence. REGISTER HERE. To help you better ennjoy the webinar, we are including brief bios of the artists discussed. Giotto di Bondone […]
Being Open to the Demands of King Lear
by Rosemary Gould, leading And Take Upon Us the Mystery of Things: The Poetry of King Lear at Toronto Pursuits 2020 When I was in graduate school, I had the great privilege of teaching as an assistant to the extraordinary Shakespeare scholar, Arthur Kirsch. When I listened to his lecture […]
Nietzsche, Freud and Derrida: The Radicals’ Appetite for Acceptance
by John Riley, leading Putting the Post in Post-Modernism at Toronto Pursuits 2020 Friedrich Nietzsche was a very, very sick man for the last twenty years of his life. His body racked by the long-term effects of dysentery and diphtheria along with brain illness consistent with syphilis, he produced no […]
Darwin and the Work of Science
by Mark Cwik, leader of our 2020 Toronto Pursuits seminar The Great (R)evolution: Darwin’s On the Origin of Species Upon first reading Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the great 19th-century biologist Thomas Henry Huxley—later to be known as “Darwin’s Bulldog”—is reported to have told friends, “How extremely stupid […]