Recap of Spring/Fall 2020 Courses
Austerity and Excess: The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby, with Jan Sidebotham
Each novel gives the reader a window into an extraordinary moment in U.S. history. The Scarlet Letter, written some 200 years after the time period in which it was set (1642), depicts a culture where values like hard work, thrift, and religious devotion flourished. The Great Gatsby shows us how people handled prosperity in the 1920s — carelessly, selfishly, and lawlessly; their gods were money and power.
What do these two books tell us about the human condition? And, more narrowly, what might they tell us about the American condition? Perhaps these works of fiction can enlighten us about the troubled and troubling nation we live in today. Most classes will begin with a short lecture about literary elements (structure, narration, symbolism) or background information; but the course will rely heavily on a discussion in which every voice is valued and in which the text is our primary focus.
Comparing Plays of Recollection by O’Neill and Friel, with Steve Reynolds
In this seminar I want to explore the connections between two plays I have directed, Ah, Wilderness! and Dancing at Lughnasa. They are the childhood recollections of two of the greatest playwrights of the American and Irish theatres: Eugene O’Neill and Brian Friel. We will look at some critical analysis, read scenes, and question the plot, character, thought, music, language and spectacle of each. I’m particularly fascinated by how each play holds a mirror up to the societal expectations of each place and time period.
The first play we will consider is by the American (of Irish descent) Eugene O’Neill. He wrote Ah, Wilderness! in 1932 and it became a star vehicle for both George M. Cohan and Will Rogers. Now considered a “problem comedy” by scholar Andrew Sofer, the play focuses on how O’Neill wished his family had behaved during the summer before he entered college.
The second play we will examine is Brian Friel’s masterpiece, Dancing at Lughnasa. It is his imaginative and poetic recreation of his family life during a few significant summer days in 1936 when he was seven years old. This play about the five Mundy sisters and their brother is brought back to life by young Michael playing the “seanchaí.”
Conversations About International Folkdance, with Pat Nash
Archaeological evidence points to the suggestion that humankind has always danced. “Folk” dance has been a peoples’ expression of their life on the land, their customs, and their stories. This course will explore dances as diverse as “Kendime” from Turkey and “Road to the Isles” from Scotland. Each class will begin with a conversation around a topic related to a specific dance or dances. I will then demonstrate the dance, inviting students to participate. Topics will be primarily drawn from the research and discussions by Don Buskirk on hissite https://folkdancefootnotes.org/. Along the way we will address questions such as:
-Why do North and Western European folk cultures have mostly partner dances while South East Europe has hardly any?
-Why is Joc de Leagane, a dance from Romania, discussed as "Purity, Blood, Women, Midwives, and Milk in Maramures?”
-Why the two names for Roma or Gypies? We’ll learn a dance entitled Cocek to better understand the beauties and tribulations of this shunned group.
Politics in Fiction and Film: Lost and Found in Translation, with Linda B. Miller
Is translation an art? When politics are the focus whose world views are prominent? Are historical memories a problem for both original authors and their translators? Why does it matter? Are novels especially rich as a source for films whose distortions could be prominent when fictional standards are themselves shifting over time and space? How, if at all, do our own expectations about form and structure shape our responses to novels and films? Explore these and other questions in a provocative set of readings and related videos including Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five; Elliot Ackerman, Waiting for Eden; Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient or Warlight; Toni Morrison, Beloved; James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk; Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, Walking Lions; Khaled Khalifa, Death is Hard Work; Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita; Tommy Orange, There There.
The Nature of Cape Cod: Inspiration for Writers, with Morgan Henderson and Bob Prescott
Some of America’s greatest writers have found inspiration in the natural beauty of the Cape ever since Henry David Thoreau walked our beaches centuries ago.
How did writers translate the visual beauty of Cape Cod into important works that capture our “place apart?” This course will examine their seminal works and visit the sites that inspired them. A collaboration between a reader of literature and a master of natural history, this course combines discussions of important writers who’ve found inspiration on Cape Cod with field trips to sites that triggered their imaginations. Morgan will help us examine works by Thoreau (“Cape Cod”), Beston (“The Outermost House”), Richardson (“The House on Nauset Marsh”), John Hay (“The Run”) and the Cape poetry of Mary Oliver. And Bob will lead the class in field trips to the locations that inspired their writings.
THE OTHER R AND H: RODGERS AND HART with Marc Strauss
When musical aficionados hear the letters “R & H,” the usual association is with the venerable songwriting team of Rodgers and Hammerstein, who wrote so many hummable hits together from 1943 until 1959 - for shows as diverse and popular as Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, and The Sound of Music.
But before composer Richard Rodgers worked with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein on eleven musicals over sixteen years, Rodgers had another, even longer partnership—twenty-four years—with lyricist Lorenz Hart, beginning in 1919 and continuing until Hart’s passing in 1943. In Broadway shows and films such as The Garrick Gaieties, Love Me Tonight, On Your Toes, Babes in Arms, The Boys from Syracuse, and Pal Joey, the first R & H wrote over 500 songs together, many of them standards to this day in the Great American Songbook: “Manhattan,” “Thou Swell,” “Where or When,” “The Lady is a Tramp,” “My Funny Valentine,” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.”
This fall 2020, Open University of Wellfleet course will focus on that earlier artistic collaboration between Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Instructor Marc Strauss, Ph.D., will present the subjects through short lectures, guided discussions, and the listening and viewing of dozens of Rodgers and Hart CD and DVD recordings, both famous and rare, as sung and danced to by extraordinary artists throughout and far beyond their 24-year partnership. A richer understanding of the distinct talents of these two musical artists—one all too often ignored or, sadly, unheard of—will be a focus of the course.
CONTEMPORARY PAINTING, 1970-2020 with Megan Hinton
This series of slide talks will show the trajectory of Contemporary Painting over the past 50 years. The five-session lectures will explore one decade per session, from 1970 to 2020. Learning about the innovations, shifts, and trends of late 20th-century - early 21st-century painting will inspire and educate both artists and art lovers. Significant American and international painters will be included, with an emphasis on multicultural, LGBTQIA, and women artists, and will offer an opportunity to immerse ourselves beyond local Cape Cod art.
Winter 2019 courses
Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, with Robert Chibka: “Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last,” Samuel Johnson sneered nine years after the final Volume of the supremely odd The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman appeared. He wasn’t alone in scorning the hilarious, indecorous, self-consciously eccentric, dirty-minded, tender-hearted novel that made a country parson the scandalous toast of 1760s London—“One extenuating circumstance attends his works, that they are too gross to be inflaming” (Richardson); “not a page of Sterne’s writing but has . . . a latent corruption—a hint as of an impure presence” (Thackeray). Dissenting opinions: “The writings of Sterne . . . form the best course of morality that ever was written” (Jefferson; yes, Thomas); “In the power of approaching and touching the finer feelings of the heart, he has never been excelled” (Scott); “the freest writer of all times, in comparison with whom all others appear stiff, square-toed, intolerant, and downright boorish” (Nietzsche); “No writing seems to flow more exactly into the very folds and creases of the individual mind, to express its changing moods, to answer its lightest whim and impulse, and yet the result is perfectly precise and composed” (Woolf). Kundera, Rushdie, & innumerable other “post-moderns” are scarcely imaginable without Sterne.
Worlds Within Wellfleet, with David Wright: This course offers a chronological look at Wellfleet history, focusing on the various individuals and entities who have shaped the sensibility we share. What do we know of the original inhabitants? The English colonizers? What did the French Canadians bring? The Finns, the Portuguese, the Irish? What about the tribe of Summer People, the artists, the intelllectuals, the retirees? What were they looking for, and what were their contributions to the collective reality we call home? Grounding ourselves in historical texts, we’ll examine and discuss the worlds within Wellfleet.
Immigration and Its Discontents, with John Cumbler: Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously said, “We are a nation of immigrants.” But as in all things historical, the story is more complicated. Some of us were not immigrants at all, but indigenous to this continent at least for some 12 thousand years, some of us were forcibly brought to this continent, while others of us are immigrants or descendants of immigrants. And although many of us are descendants of immigrants, as a nation we have not often welcomed our fellow migrants with open arms. This course will explore--emphasis on explore --the history of American immigration. It will focus on the tensions around the need for labor within the white economy, the fear of loss of privilege, the exploitation of that fear for political gain, the demographic shifts which facilitate migration and the political and economic forces which propel it.