This year, Common Ground Teaching Fellows have the option of four exciting seminars. You will be asked to rank your seminar in order of preference. Please note that while every effort will be made to place you in your first or second choice seminar, space constraints mean we cannot guarantee you your preferred options. 

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Seminar 1

Memory: Homer goes to Hollywood…Again

Dr. Marina Trninic

In tears [Penelope] told the holy singer, “Stop. 
please, Phemius! You know so many songs, 
enchanting tales of things that gods and men
have done, the deeds the singers publicize. 
Sing something else and let them drink in peace.
Stop this upsetting song that always breaks
my heart, so I can hardly bear my grief. 
I miss him all the time – that man, my husband,
whose story is so famous throughout Greece.”

----Homer’s Odyssey (translation by Emily Wilson)

Poor Penelope, separated for two decades from her beloved Odysseus, simply cannot listen to Phemius’s blockbuster song again. Given her private memories of Odysseus, she experiences with unbearable sorrow what others enjoy as wine-o’clock entertainment. Worse still, her own son, Telemachus, sullenly refuses to turn the music down: “the newest song is always praised the most. So steel your heart and listen,” he retorts. Of course, unlike Penelope, Telemachus lacks private memories of his father. He relies on public memory: the songs by which bards immortalize the greatness of war heroes. Homer’s poem thus sets up a central question: which Odysseus will return home? The husband of Penelope’s private memories? Or the public memory of Odysseus recounted by Telemachus’ favorite songs? Then there is the really burning question: “Does Matt Damon have the chops to play such a complicated role?” 

In anticipation of Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of Homer’s epic (and a field trip to the movies!), this seminar will discuss the tension between private and public memory in The Odyssey, as well as Aeschylus’s version of a story Homer repeatedly invokes as a dark mirror to Odysseus’ return: Agamemnon’s homecoming from Troy and his murder by Clytaemnestra. Both narratives turn on the ways their homecoming kings are remembered and forgotten in private and in public, not just by their subjects, but more especially by their wives and sons. How will Nolan’s filmic adaptation of The Odyssey navigate between the personal and public memories of its characters; between intimate recollection, and the lurid spectacle of heroic violence? Or do Homer, Aeschylus, and Nolan’s adaptation offer other lessons at this time in our history? 
 
Texts:
Aeschylus, Agamemnon. Translated by Robert Fagles
Homer, Odyssey. Translated by Emily Wilson 

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Seminar 2

Love, Loss, and Lucidity

Dr. Janet Lawler

We shall not cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time, 

----T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” The Four Quartets

We’ll never know ‘til we try
To find the other side of goodbye. 

----Warren Zevon, “Please Stay,” The Wind

“Enjoy every sandwich,” a gravely ill Warren Zevon famously advised David Letterman during his last Late Show appearance before his death. His final album, The Wind, resonates with the understanding that our lives and loves, in all their simplicity and complexity, are rendered newly miraculous by the awareness of their inevitable end. In this seminar, we will discuss texts that bring lyrical, emotional, and visceral insights to their exploration of the clarifying tensions between love and loss. Whether we are coming or going, how can loss bring us closer to ourselves, each other, and the world. Is grief the price we pay for love? Or does the finitude of our days make love, desire, and good sandwiches all the more thing precious? We’ll think through personal, political, and imaginative implications of such questions, guided by writers, singers, and filmmakers anchored and adrift in loss and love. 
 
Texts: 
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (novel)
Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death (novella)
Civil Wars, The Civil Wars (album)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky “White Nights” (short story)
Michael Gondry (director), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (film)
Sophocles. Antigone (play)
John Prine. The Tree of Forgiveness (album)
Warren Zevon. The Wind (album)

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SEMINAR 3

Poetry For People Who Hate Poetry

Dr. Hayan Charara

A line in the film The Big Short famously sums up how many people feel about poems: “Truth is like poetry, and most people f***ing hate poetry.” 

Who or what is to blame for the state in which poetry finds itself is open to endless debate. So instead, let’s figure out how to enjoy poetry: teaching it, reading it, writing and workshopping it. We will approach poetry and poetry writing with the goal of demystifying the genre and making it more accessible and enjoyable not only for ourselves but for our students. We will read poems and writings about poetry, as well as practice and discuss classroom exercises and techniques, including sampling a “workshop menu” of different ways to discuss poems for either creative writing workshops or literature courses. Finally, we will write poems, too—poems that people will not hate (but if they do, we won’t care because we will know better). 
 
Texts:
Tony Hoagland, Real Sofistikashun
Michael Thune, Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns
All other readings will be provided via handout or PDF

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Seminar 4

Playing Grown Up: Innocence, Experience, and Creative Imagination

Dr. Max Rayneard

Little Fly
Thy summers play,
My thoughtless hand
Has brush’d away. 
 
Am not I 
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?

 --- Blake, “THE FLY”, The Songs of Innocence and of Experience

In the late 18th century, William Blake watched Industrialism strip London’s poor of dignity. In response, his short and accessible Songs of Innocence and of Experience held every human sacred, with their inherent divinity most gloriously expressed in the unconstrained imagination of child’s play. In Blake’s visions, adults too have the capacity to imagine and play, which their experience can hone (rather than necessarily corrupt) into powerful forces for good. 

In this seminar, we will use Blake’s Songs to grapple with literary, theatrical, and filmic representations of imaginative play. Is there, for example, wisdom in the seemingly dimwitted nonchalance of Bottom’s playfulness in A Midsummer Night’s Dream? What is the relationship between play, theatricality, and protest in Woza Albert!, a protest piece that imagines Christ’s second coming in Apartheid South Africa? What role does Craig Thompson afford brotherly rambunctiousness in understanding love and creativity as an adult? Can recollections of imaginative play reconcile a son to the memory of his late mother in Ken Chui’s short story, “The Paper Menagerie”? How does collective play help five sisters rebel against repressive patriarchal control in Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s French-Turkish film, Mustang? We will consider “playfulness” and “play” not just as expressions of innocence, but as a disposition and practice that can bring the better world of our imaginations into existence. 
 
Texts: 
Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1594-1595)
Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789-1794)
Mbongeni Ngema, Percy Mtwa, Barney Simon, Woza Albert! (1981)
Craig Thompson, Blankets (2003) 
Ken Chui, “The Paper Menagerie” (2011)
Deniz Gamze Ergüven (dir) Mustang (2015)