New Seminars begin in April and May!

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Rousseau, First and Second Discourses

Sundays, 10:00-11:20 am ET | April 5-June 28

Has the progress of civilization made us better or worse? In his First Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, Rousseau argues that the arts and sciences corrupt morality rather than improve it. In the Second Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality, he traces how natural human freedom was lost to society, property, and political power. Together these texts form one of the most radical and searching critiques of modern civilization ever written. No background in philosophy is necessary. Beginners are welcome.

Text: Rousseau, The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, translated and edited by John T. Scott (University of Chicago Press)

Reading load: 10-15 pages/week

Seminar Leader: Jess Joseph is a graduate of the University of Chicago and has led great books reading groups on Plato's Theaetetus, George Eliot's Middlemarch, and Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed.

Rumi the Storyteller: the Masnavi, Book 1

Mondays, 12:00-1:30 pm ET | April 6-June 22

Rumi's masterpiece, the Masnavi, is perhaps the greatest work of Persian literature. Often called the "Persian Qur'an," the Masnavi is a poem made up of many stories that flow into each other, each with a moral lesson or spiritual teaching. Rumi's great sense of humor and incisive insight make it a joy to read. In this group, we'll read through the first book of the Masnavi together, focusing each week on a small set of stories from this remarkable and entertaining text.

Text: Rumi, Masnavi (English)

Reading load: a few pages/week

Seminar Leader: Jeff Johnston

Shakespeare, Reading the Sonnets Aloud (6 sessions)

Mondays, 3:20-4:50 pm ET | May 4-June 15

Learn to read Shakespeare's poetry out loud, as he intended it! Let the sonnets unfold as we re-enact the experience of the speaker. Recitation allows us to enter each sonnet and hear meanings that only the human voice can convey. This is not an acting class, but we will familiarize ourselves with iambic pentameter, classical acting, acting theory, and a few fundamentals about meter, enjambment, elision, overfull lines, French endings, etc. Shakespeare found language that puts us back into sympathy with our nature, and we already have what we need by virtue of our experiences. Non-actors and beginners welcome.

Text: Vendler, Helen, The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997, 696 pp. ISBN 978-0674637122 (pb).

Reading load: 1-2 pages/week

Seminar Leader: Tim Pabon and Reynaldo Miranda-Zúñiga.  Tim is a seasoned, classically trained stage actor and voice actor, having worked with the Folger Shakespeare in DC, and also the Renaissance Spanish repertory.  Reynaldo is an alumnus of St. John’s College, Annapolis, and past president of the large Northern California Alumni Chapter, and has led seminars for Symposium since it was founded 20 years ago. 

Bach Listening Lab: 6 Early Cantatas (6 sessions)

Tuesdays 12:00-1:30 pm ET | April 13-May 18

The vast majority of Bach's works are cantatas: short works for voice and orchestra, usually between 20 and 40 minutes long, written for church services or special occasions like festivals or funerals. These cantatas are little gems of musical composition, and often contain surprising moments. In this group, we'll listen to six of Bach's cantatas from his first decade as a composer, starting from what John Eliot Gardiner calls his "first-known attempt at painting narrative in music" when he was 22. No prior understanding of music theory is required.

Text: Bach, Cantatas sheet music

Seminar Leader: Jeff Johnston

Borges, Poems

Tuesdays, 3:00-4:30 pm ET | April 21-July 7

Borges' poems bridged modernism and postmodernism, and revolutionized world literature.  Borges started as a poet, and is best known in the Hispanophone world as poet and essayist. To our advantage his first language was English, and his first great influence, whom he translated, was Whitman. As he said in his Harvard Lectures in the 1960s "life is made of poetry, not the other way 'round."  Explore with us what this might mean, as we follow him in treating of time, reality, identity, dreams, philosophy, imagination, and fantasy. Our translators include Robert Fitzgerald, WS Merwin, John Updike and many others.  

Text: Borges, Selected Poems, facing translation ed. Alexander Coleman, New York: Penguin Classics Random House LLC, 2000, 496 pp., paperback ISBN 9780140587210 

Reading Load: 3-4 pp./week

Leaders: Miryam Bujanda and Reynaldo Miranda-Zúñiga. Miryam is a poet and teaches at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio TX, and is a Macondo Writer’s Workshop alumna. (see Reynaldo's bio above)

Henry Adams, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres

Tuesdays, 5:30-7:00 pm ET | April 7-June 30

After his wife’s suicide in 1885, Henry Adams tried to think through the topsy-turvy contemporary world and his own life in Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1913). He views the High Middle Ages as a civilization that had built and nurtured a transcendental unity as he leads the reader on a pilgrimage back in time, through a veiled confession, to a homecoming. Adams introduced Americans to a half-forgotten past. This seminar is a prelude to The Education of Henry Adams which will be offered in the summer.

Text: Adams, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres: A Study of Thirteenth-Century Unity, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982, 402 pp., paperback ISBN 9780691003351

Reading Load:  25-30 pp./week.

Leader: Reynaldo Miranda-Zúñiga is an alumnus of St. John’s College, Annapolis, and past president of the large Northern California Alumni Chapter.  He has led seminars with Symposium for 20 years and with other organizations for the last 25 years.  

Intricate, Imperfect, Various Things - E.E. Cummings' Is 5 (5 sessions) 

Tuesdays, 7:30-8:45 pm ET | April 29-May 27

 With a simplicity of innovation and a playfulness of being, E.E. Cummings' fifth volume of poetry Is 5 (1926) gives readers the full feel of what modern poetry means to a modern world. Indeed, it is a world of lovers, drunks, seducers, collected souls and all the funny people you meet on the streets of your heart - just the verb of it all and told with a beauty of word and punctuation as  tools for epiphany. There is no equal to the astonishment of a Cummings' poem; discover this wonderful collection of life as no parentheses, in 5 easy reading sessions.

Text: Is 5 by e.e. cummings.  Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1996, 128 pages.  ISBN: 0871401649

Reading Load:  15-20 pp (of poems)/week

Leader: Denise Ahlquist and JJ Patton have been leading literary seminars together for over 10 years.. Denise has a background in  English and literary theory at the College of Wooster and the University of Wisconsin - Madison plus years of leading Shared Inquiry discussions with the Great Books Foundation. This is complemented by JJ, an alumnus of the University of Pittsburgh with a lifetime of writing and learning modern poetry.

How to Read a Great Book: Plato's Meno with Klein Commentary

Tuesdays, 8:50-10:20 pm ET | April 7-June 30

How to Read a Great Book: Plato's Meno with Jacob Klein's Commentary on Plato's Meno. This is the first in a new series of seminars that aim to help us to become better readers. Not all great books arevto be read in the same manner: each traverses distinct terrains in different ways, each asks questions different in kind that demand fitting methods of inquiry. Plato's Seventh Letter asks to be read in a way appropriate to it, which is different from his Republic, and and both of which are different from his Laws, and so on. With our close reading of the Meno, we will follow the lead of one of the best commentaries on the Meno and on Platonic dialogues in general. Beginners and Intermediate-level welcome.

Texts: Plato, Meno, trans. George Anastaplo and Laurence Berns, in the Focus Philosophical Library Series, Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004, ISBN 0941051714. Klein, Jacob, A Commentary on Plato's Meno, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965 (out of print); or, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012, ISBN 9780807873984.

Reading Load: App. 25 pp/week.

Leaders: Reynaldo Miranda-Zúñiga and Jason Happel. Reynaldo is an alumnus of St. John’s College, Annapolis, past president of the large Northern California Alumni Chapter, and has led Symposium seminars since it's founding 20 years ago, and for other organizations for the last 25. Jason is a visiting professor in ethics and political philosophy at Framingham State University. Both have taken a life-long interest in Plato, and in Klein's work.

Al-Ghazali's Path to Sufism: the Deliverance from Error (6 sessions)

Wednesdays 12:00-1:30 ET | May 20-June 24 

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali was the most important theologian of medieval Islam. In 1091, he was appointed to the most important academic position in the Islamic world: leadership of Nizamiyya University in Baghdad. However, after a few years there, he suffered an intellectual and spiritual crisis, abandoning his position and family to wander the land as a mendicant, eventually becoming a Sufi monk. In his remarkable little autobiography, The Deliverance from Error, al-Ghazali explains his strange journey between philosophy, religion, and mysticism. We'll read through this short text together.

Text: Al-Ghazali, Deliverance from Error (English)

Reading load: about 6 pages/week

Seminar Leader: Jeff Johnston

Shakespeare, Henry the Sixth, Part I

Wednesdays, 2:00-3:30 pm ET | April 15-July 1

The King is dead! Long live the King... Fifty years of conflict, blood, treachery: the Wars of the Roses, the Hundred Years’ War, and the problem of hereditary succession with a line doubtfully descended from a usurpation only twenty-five years past and you have mayhem, mendacity, and enough moral murk to turn glory into miasma. The Henry VI plays give us a rich crop of character -- Joan of Arc (Henry VI, Part 1), Cade’s Rebellion (Henry VI, Part 2), and the reign of King Edward IV (Henry VI, Part 3) -- which we will explore over the next three quarters. If you've read the other Henries (and Richards) but haven't quite found time to tackle Henry VI, now is a rare opportunity to read it with other Shakespeare super-fans.  

Reading load: several pages/week

Seminar Leader: Eric Stull holds degrees in Liberal Arts, Eastern Classics, Greek and Latin. He has taught high-school history and English, and writing and literature in nine colleges and universities for past 20 years.

Joyce, Ulysses

Wednesdays, 7:00-8:30 pm ET | April 7-June 24

Ulysses has a reputation for being difficult. And, at times, it can be -- especially if you are doing it by yourself. In this seminar, we’ll move step by step through Joyce’s account of a single day in Dublin, paying close attention to voice, structure, humor, and character. Rather than trying to “solve” the novel, we’ll aim to understand how it works and why it still matters. Along the way, we’ll lightly explore some of the book’s key literary connections, including Homer’s Odyssey, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Dante’s Inferno. These parallels will help orient us without overwhelming the primary task: reading Ulysses.  This course is designed for both first-time readers and those returning to the novel. The goal is simple: to make steady, thoughtful progress through one of the most important works of modern literature.

Reading load: multiple pages/week

Seminar Leader: Randy Wootton has a BS in English from the Naval Academy, an MALA from St John's College, and an MBA from Harvard. He has taught at both university and high school levels while doing time in the Corporate Sector. He is now going back to his roots.

Gospel of Mark

Thursdays, 8:50-10:20 pm ET | April 8-June 25

"The Good News" according to the Apostle Mark: How can the Christ suffer? This seminar is part of a series on Jewish and Christian texts, which alternates Jewish and Christian sacred texts. Anyone who is interested in a pluralistic, serious (with some playfulness), conversational approach to religious texts, read for the purpose of understanding the text is invited to join each quarter. We like to think we are contributing to interfaith dialogue by not adopting a theory of interfaith dialogue, but by just doing it.

Text: New Jerusalem Bible, New York and London: Doubleday, 1990, hardcover ISBN 9780385142649.  We use translations that are excellent, fresh, and unfamiliar to readers to avoid tired, trite translations.  This particular translation offers helpful, scholarly footnotes.  If you do not wish to acquire this Bible, we are happy send you a PDF of the translation by Ronald Knox, with only a very few footnotes.

Reading Load: 3-4 pp./week

Leaders: Reynaldo Miranda-Zúñiga and Jason Happel. (See their bios above)

Crosscurrents: Giotto, Dante and Trecento Music

Fridays, 12:00-1:30 pm ET | April 10-June 26

The early 1300s were a bustle of artistic activity in Italy. Dante was busy helping to invent Italian literature; Giotto was helping to initiate the movement we now know as the Renaissance; and Marchetto da Padova was inventing the modern system of musical notation. In this hybrid course, we'll explore music, art, and literature all at once - reading Dante's Vita Nova, looking at Giotto's great frescos in the Scrovegni Chapel, and listening to important works of music by Marchetto and others.

Reading load: a few pages/week

Seminar Leader: Jeff Johnston

Tolstoy, War and Peace

Fridays, 3:30-5:00 pm ET | April 3 (through December)

We have a Russian novel that begins in French and is about a war against the French; a novel that the author claimed wasn’t a novel at all; a 1460-page book with two nouns of seemingly equal weight in the title, yet unequal in their accounts. What sort of book is War and Peace? Why, the sort one has to read to find out. One might suppose that the only way to get through a very long book is to read it as quickly as possible. But what would be the point of just getting through the battle of Borodino, the burning of Moscow, the conversations, the swirl of dancing, the lives of Natasha, Prince Andrei, and others? If life is for the living, then a book is for the reading, which we will do at the slow-and-savor rate.

Reading load: about 40 pages a week. War and Peace is divided into four Books and an Epilogue, each into Parts, and so on into Chapters.

Text: any good translation (Dunnigan, Maude; Maude, Briggs, Pevear; Volokhonsky)

Seminar Leaders: Eric Stull and Linda McConnell.  (See Eric's bio above) Linda McConnell taught literature for 25 years and did her thesis on Tolstoy's War and Peace and Homer's Iliad.

(P.S. This is not to be confused with the biography, "Leo Tolstoy" by Warren Pease.)