LITERATURE

/HUMANITIES

Fall 2008

Demystifying Dracula: The Truth about a Legend EC (KTD)

French Literature: The Heptameron EC (KTD)

Writer’s View of the World: Africa EC (KTD)

Literature and Law EC (KTD)

Anthropology Through Literature: Women's World EC (Tiburon Town Hall)

Demystifying Dracula: The Truth about a Legend

Explore the biography of King Vlad the Impaler of Walachia (present day Romania); learn about his accomplishments and about his historical, as well as his political importance to Medieval Europe. This course is a rich and colorful fresco of life in Romania, Hungary, Poland and Turkey from Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages. The cultural and historical background of Eastern Europe and Turkey will be presented.

Erika Harkins is a Hungarian with a passion for Literature and History. For another course taught by Erika, see “The French People: Their History and Culture” listed under History.

  • 7 Wednesdays, 2:10-4pm
  • Sept. 3-Oct. 15
  • Kentfield Campus, Harlan Center 165
  • Fee $66 (Includes $2 materials fee)
  • Course #85080 EC

Another course of interest . . .

The French People: Their History and Culture

is listed under History.

French Literature: The Heptameron

Join us to read, discuss and analyze The Heptameron; the most important literary work of Marguerite de Navarre, celebrated French writer and royal from the XVI century. Inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, the Heptameron (Seven Days) consists of 72 stories ostensibly told over the course of a week by a group of travelers—five men and five women—stranded by bad weather at an abbey in the Pyrenees. Each of them tells a story; subtle psychological observations and terrestrial images of life. Each story is followed by debates based on the moral and sociological problems arisen by the plot. Marguerite de Navarre is the creator of the famous French Art of Conversation.

  • Erika Harkins
  • 7 Wednesdays, 2:10-4pm
  • Oct. 22-Dec. 3
  • Kentfield Campus, Harlan Center 165
  • Fee $66 (Includes $2 materials fee)
  • Course #85082 EC

Writer’s View of the World: Africa

Africa -- its tragic past, its tumultuous present -- has provided a setting and context for some of the finest works of fiction of the past fifty years. This quarter we will read and discuss four such works: the first an African classic, the other three penned by Nobel Laureates: Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Doris Lessing's African Stories, Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughters, and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace. The range and diversity of these four distinctive voices should prove ideal vehicles for our literary odyssey through Africa.

Longtime writing and literature instructor, Jacqueline Kudler, MA (English Literature), is a published poet and feature writer.

  • 6 Thursdays, 1:10-3pm
  • Oct. 23-Dec. 4 (No class Nov. 27)
  • Kentfield Campus, Olney Hall 105
  • Fee $58
  • Course #85083 EC

Literature and Law

Our Literature and Law course this Fall provides a writers' guide to America's deliberations over the last fifty years concerning social and legal roles for women and men. Diverse writers -- such as Margaret Atwood, Ernest Hemingway, Sharon Olds, Tennessee Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Diablo Cody, and Richard Yates -- will supply us with provocative texts for a judicious and a literary consideration of the roles of women and men – past, present, and even future. This popular limited enrollment course uses novels, stories, plays, poems, films, and court decisions. New and old participants are welcome.

David Robertson, A.B., J.D., a graduate of Stanford and Yale Law School, has taught political philosophy and literature at Yale College, the University of San Francisco and the College of Marin.

  • 7 Fridays, 10:10am-12:30pm
  • Sept. 5-Oct. 17
  • Kentfield Campus, Harlan Center 165
  • Fee $79
  • Course #85084 EC

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Anthropology through Literature: Women’s World

Encounter astounding women, historical and contemporary. Begin with Rosalind Miles’ provocative history of women, Who Cooked the Last Supper? (2001). Follow Marilyn Yalom as she traces the parallel development of actual and symbolic power in Birth of the Chess Queen (2004). Enjoy Alexandra Lapierre’s Artemisia (2000), the vivid recreation of that 17th century painter’s life, while also gaining broader insights distilled from Whitney Chadwick’s scholarly Women, Art and Society (1996). A bibliography is provided and students may borrow such biographies as Nancy Goldstone’s Four Queens in 13th century Provence (2007), Michael Steen’s Enchantress of Nation (2007) about the 19th century French opera singer Pauline Viardot or Luis Alberto Urrea’s Hummingbird’s Daughter, a fictionalized life of his Mexican curandera great-aunt Teresita, and Julia Blackburn’s Daisy Bates in the Desert (1995) about an early 20th century European living among the Aborigines of Australia.

  • Maggi Nicholson
  • 7 Mondays, 10:45am-12:45pm
  • Sept. 8-Oct. 20
  • Tiburon Town Hall/Community Room
  • 1505 Tiburon Blvd., Tiburon
  • Fee $56 (Includes $1 special fee)
  • Course #85283 EC



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