Recap of Winter Session 2018 Courses

Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones with Bob Chibka
What are novels good for?  In 1740s Britain, it was a live and loaded question. Driven from a successful playwriting career by political censorship, tempted to prose fiction by the pious moralizings of Samuel Richardson’s wildly popular Pamela, Henry Fielding embraced the satiric tradition of Don Quixote; but the narrator of Fielding’s masterpiece, Tom Jones (1749), calls himself “the Founder of a new Province of Writing.”  We’ll make a five-week survey of this province’s entertaining topography.

The 1930s: Fred & Ginger at RKO with Marc Strauss
The team of Fred Astaire (née Frederick Austerlitz; 1899 – 1987) and Ginger Rogers (née Virginia Katherine McMath; 1911 – 1995) almost single-handedly—well, with some help from Shirley Temple and a few other Hollywood performers—brought cheer and artistry into the lives of millions of Depression-era movie viewers the world over. With the support of some of the greatest song composers of the Golden Age—Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Dorothy Fields, and George and Ira Gershwin—as well as Art Deco designer Van Nest Polglase and Costume Designer Walter Plunkett, RKO Radio Pictures brought to the 1930s movie screen unparalleled romantic comedy and musical fantasy.

Fall 2017 Courses

A History of Provincetown with Don Wilding
The course will consist of five two-hour lectures, with dozens of PowerPoint images to go along with each session:
The Earliest Settlers: A look at visitors before the Pilgrims, the Mayflower in Provincetown Harbor; how Provincetown was once part of Truro; and through the 1800s, including the introduction of the railroad;
Graveyard of Ships: Lifesavers and Lighthouses, Wrecks and Rescues: Over 4,000 ships ran aground off Cape Cod’s Outer Beach, many of them along Race Point and the treacherous Peaked Hill Bars. The Lifesaving Service (later the Coast Guard) and the lighthouses of the Cape Tip saved countless lives;
Artists and Writers: A look at the creative geniuses of the Cape tip, from Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams to Charles Hawthorne and Hans Hofmann;
Kingdom of the Dunes: The landscape of Provincetown is highlighted by its spectacular dune country, which has been home to the dune shacks and its unique culture;
The 20th Century: The modern era of Provincetown, from the construction of the Pilgrim Monument to the arrival of the Cape Cod National Seashore.


Cape Cod Contemporary Artists with Robert Rindler
This series is designed to introduce participants to extraordinary fine artists working among us on the Cape today, and to engage with them in a spirited and illuminating dialogue.
For each of five weeks, we will meet, experience, and explore the art of 2 new artists who have achieved significant success and acclaim in recent years.

This new generation of emerging, transformational leaders in the arts, deeply involved in creative inquiry, continues to expand our perspectives on how art is being redefined within our current cultural, social and political environment.

We will hear from 10 local and noteworthy art makers, from different media disciplines, who are now or have recently been exhibiting their work in local galleries and museums where we can see their art first hand. Other guest critics, curators and gallerists will often be included to add an experienced perspective on the current state of fine arts.


Cape Cod: Land and Sea with John Cumbler
This course will look at the environmental history of the Outer Cape from the age of sail and wood to the age of steam, coal and iron.  It will explore the emergence of the amphibious culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and what happened to that world through the nineteenth century.  The interaction between the people and the Cape environment will be the main focus of the course.


Interpreting The Turn of the Screw with John Dennis Anderson
The Turn of the Screw is a ghost story “beyond everything . . . for general uncanny ugliness and horror and pain.” This is the warning of a mysterious storyteller to a group gathered around a fire in an old house on Christmas Eve in Henry James’s 1898 tale. The Turn of the Screw is a classic tale of horror and also a complex and ambiguous trap for readers, designed to make them “think the evil” for themselves. This class will join the long-standing, twisting critical debates on how to interpret this endlessly fascinating story of a governess to two children presumably possessed by the ghosts of dead servants.
We will read the story and explore its historical and biographical contexts for clues to its interpretation. These contexts will include the conventions of the ghost story genre, case studies of ghosts and other psychic phenomena documented by researchers when James wrote the story, the class structures constraining governesses and servants in Victorian England, and psychological theories of hysteria and sexual repression and feminist critiques of them.
The class will also examine adaptations of the story in various media (fiction, plays, films, television, and opera) as examples of a wide range of ways to interpret the text, including the film The Innocents, Benjamin Britten’s opera based on the story, and Jeffrey Hatcher’s stage version. The class should buy the Bedford St. Martin’s third edition of the text, edited by Peter G. Beidler, which includes biographical, historical, and cultural contexts, critical history, and essays from contemporary critical perspectives.


Politics is Personal: Alfred Hitchcock’s War Films with Marc Strauss
​The Fall 2017 Open University of Wellfleet course Politics is Personal: Alfred Hitchcock’s War Films, taught by Marc Strauss, includes entire film screenings the night before class at the Riley Strauss Gallery & Gardens (45 Lawrence Road, Wellfleet), a home with a screening room, 65” large-screen TV, and comfortable seats which is located behind the Fire Station on the way up the hill to the Wellfleet Elementary School (parking available at both the home address & the school), followed the next day with a two-hour class meeting at the Wellfleet Council on Aging Conference Room that includes a half-hour lecture, film excerpts, a Question and Answer period, and discussion. Short readings will be required from one of Marc Strauss’ Hitchcock books—Hitchcock Nonetheless: The Master’s Touch in his Least Celebrated Films (2007; McFarland & Company), available for purchase in advance through amazon.com—as well as excerpts from other Hitchcock articles and books available via email attachments. The main theme of this course is explicitly stated in the title: Hitchcock’s “take” on war from three distinct eras addresses the impact that national and international actions have on the individual protagonists in the films (stand-ins for ourselves) as they struggle to achieve emotional growth on their own and in a close romantic involvement with another person.  Marc Strauss’ teaching style involves rigorous academic research in a conversational and engaging manner. He works to draw out students’ own impressions, interpretations, and evaluations through an enthusiasm for his topic.

​Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles with Rhoda Flaxman

Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, Hardy presents the gripping tale of “ a pure woman faithfully presented.” Tess exists as a figure in a predominantly rural landscape, Identified with nature, caught between a dying agricultural past and forces of modernism. Among other things she represents Hardy’s own ambivalence about the transformation of both urban and rural English life, the idealization of women, and cultural anxiety about changing sexual mores.  Hardy’s novels, like Janus, look both ahead to Modernism and backward to the Victorian heyday of the realistic novel. A study of Tess will allow us to ask whether Hardy ultimately supports or undercuts those systems created by human beings to organize experience, be they religious, mythic, historical, folkloric, philosophical, scientific, psychological, or other. Our class will be conducted as a collaborative conversation about questions such as whether Tess is villain or victor, and how we would evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of this beautiful novel.