Literary Nomads

Wanderings on Literature and Language

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Signpost – Pretty Gardens in Paint

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Where we’ve been and where we’re going, and we take a pause in a museum gallery, too!

Trailer: Journey 6

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Looking ahead at Season 6: Ursula K. Le Guin’s story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” and all the wrestling we do with dilemmas of ethics.

What I Get Wrong

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We finish a carpe diem journey and I reflect back on what I’ve learned, what I believe, and where we are going next.

Our Season Journeys

Journey 1: Kate Chopin, "The Story of An Hour"

We begin our wandering with the famous Chopin short story, exploring topics of reading aesthetically, freedom, tragic hamartia, female silencing, and some missteps in reading Victory.

Journey 2: Anonymous, "Fowls in the Frith"

A little marginalia of a poem, author unknown, yet open to our examination of song and philosophy, the history of authorship, the intentional fallacy, our changing concept of ego, and an outright challenge to the Sacred canon.

Journey 3: Chimamanda Adichie, "Tomorrow Is Too Far"

What differences in another culture’s conception of story? We examine epistemic shifts, overlapping narrators, bad binaries, and what happens when we attach the wrong frame to art.

Journey 4: Vincent Van Gogh, 'Immersive Van Gogh'

Think what you want of recreations, but it’s all we’ve ever done. We consider ekphrasis in literature, the role of art under capitalism, meaning in the non-verbal, and the Sesame Street Effect. We also take a field trip into a digital Van Gogh experience.

Journey 5: Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress"

A long examination of the metaphysical poem, its problematic and philosophical tensions, the ironically enduring history of carpe diem, and our readerly discomfiture and uncertainty. Along the way, we meet Catullus, Dorian Gray, Trekkie-verse Sulu, Saul Bellow, Rilke, and Dorian Gray; and we get to write a poem and essay!