We have a very busy couple of months coming up… including weddings, brewery trips and visits to family and friends but from June things go quiet. Plenty of time for writing, gardening, taking photos… and reading.
A friend recommended a ten week MOOC course, (massive on-line open course) on the Fiction of Relationships from Brown University and we have both signed up for it. I have just had a little look at the reading list… it is daunting to say the least but I have become very lazy in my reading so I am looking forward to the challenge greatly!
The notes describe the course:
As individuals we are defined by relationships, by our connection to people, places, and things. Such connectedness can be not only emotional and erotic but also political, environmental, and even textual, enacted through writing. In this course we explore the nature and meaning of such connections in ten major works of narrative fiction from the 18th century to the present.
As this course will demonstrate, the most critical relationships in our lives—the comings and goings that define us—are not always easy to get a fix on, but literature offers us a special sighting on these arrangements. Through exploratory readings of these narrative works, the course will seek to make relationship visible, bringing our traffic with the world and with others into clearer focus.
Here is the reading list:
- Manon Lescaut by Abbé Prévost
- Bartleby the Scrivener and Benito Cereno by Herman Melville
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
- Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony and The Country Doctor by Franz Kafka
- To the Lighthouse byVirginia Woolf
- Light in August by William Faulkner
- Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
- The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas
- Beloved by Tony Morrison
- Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee.
I’ve read Kafka, Brontë and Woolf, but none of the other books, and I confess I had never heard of Tarjei Vesaas! I think I had better start reading some of them now otherwise I won’t have enough time to do that, keep writing and keep blogging! I’ll keep you updated on my progress!
Lois Elsden 