ONLINE SEMINAR
July 28 | Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook

Description

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LEADER

Dr. Wendy O’Brien is a philosopher with over 30 years’ experience teaching in academic and non-academic environments, including Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, Wilfrid Laurier University, the University of Waterloo, Harvard, Oxford and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Her work explores subjects including power, violence, the relation to the Other, home, silence, and creativity. She is presently working on a long-term project on the concept of wonder. An active member of the Ontario literary scene, she has been an interviewer for organizations including By the Lake Book Club, the Toronto International Festival of Authors and GritLit, as well as hosting Bourbon and Books book club in both Toronto and Hamilton.

BOOKS

The Golden Notebook: A Novel, by Doris Lessing
(Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1999)
ISBN-13: 9780060931407

This edition is recommended but not required.

We encourage you to support local bookstores or other independent sellers, especially as alternatives to Amazon.

In the US and the UK, try Bookshop.org, World of Books, or Ebooks (electronic books only)

In the US and Canada, try Powell’s Books, IndieBound, and Thiftbooks (used books only in Canada)

In Canada, try McNally Robinson or Indigo

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In her citation on winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007, Doris Lessing was described as “that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny.” There is perhaps no better description of Lessing’s novel, The Golden Notebook, than this. Daring in its subject matter and its experimentation with form, the novel once hailed as a modern masterpiece has to a great extent been forgotten.

Yet as we emerge from years of political and personal turmoil and losses, as we step back and reconsider all that has happened to us, all that we have lived, this novel has new resonances. Looking back at the political events and social uprisings from the late 1930s through the late 1950s, at the events leading up to WWII and those in its aftermath, it captures something of the mood and some of the challenges we face after a time of political uprising, social unrest and worldwide tragedy. It resonates as we reckon with our own recent past. And so a return to this novel – not in search of answers to our questions, but for its raising of those questions.

In this novel, the main character, Anna Wulf, takes up the project of telling, of writing her life. But how to do so? What form should it take? Can it be told in a biography or can it only be written of through fiction? How do you write a life in such a manner that captures the ambiguities and frustrations of lived experience? How do you write of personal dramas set against political uprisings – of passion and of political belief? How do you do so in such a manner that captures the many and various ways you are divided from others and divided within yourself? How do you write of the construction of a life and, in so doing, capture the ways in which it always already was falling apart? How can you write of love?

In this seminar we take up these questions as we undertake a carefully reading of the text.

All online seminar payments are nonrefundable. All discount codes must be used at the time of purchase; no retroactive discounts will be issued.

Classical Pursuits does not record seminars. By participating in any seminar, registrants agree not to make their own seminar recordings and to abide by the Classical Pursuits code of conduct.

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