Literature, Poetry, and Drama   

After a brief introduction by Marilyn, participants will read aloud, then discuss, Sophocles' play, Oedipus The King. The Penguin Classics edition, translated by Robert Fagles, is required, so that we are all reading from the same version.

Marilyn Scott was a lecturer in Classics and Great Books at UM and taught Latin and English at Ann Arbor's Community High School.

Using Robert Fagles’ translation of the Odyssey (required), we will do a close reading and discussion of the poem. We will get to know Odysseus, “that man of many ways” (as war hero; as master of disguise; as teller of tales; as skilled craftsmen; and, finally, as husband and father).

Marilyn Scott was a lecturer in Classics and Great Books at UM and taught Latin and English at Ann Arbor's Community High School.

This study group will be an introduction to medieval literature with a focus on Middle English Dream Visions. We will discuss familiar writers like Geoffrey Chaucer, as well as less familiar writers like Julian of Norwich and the Pearl-Poet. The genre of the "dream vision" was particularly popular in the Middle Ages. It allowed writers to experiment with looking and turning inward-- a practice that facilitated divine revelation and often allowed them to grapple with in articulatable feelings of grief, love, and longing. As we read Middle English dream visions together, we will discuss the genre's use of allegory as an exploratory mode, and I will provide insight into medieval histories of religion, emotion, embodiment, and sensation.

Madeline Fox is a Ph.D. Candidate in English Language and Literature. She studies allegory, affect, and sensation in Middle English allegorical literature.

Using Robert Fagles’ translation of the Iliad (required), we will do a close reading and discussion of the poem. Our main focus will be on Homer’s characters and what they tell us about life, death, and war. We will also spend some time looking at the forms and devices of epic poetry.

Marilyn Scott was a lecturer in Classics and Great Books at UM and taught Latin and English at Ann Arbor's Community High School.

We will read aloud and discuss four plays by Eugene Ionesco, a leading French playwright/creator of the Theater of the Absurd. The Bald Soprano - Anti-play (1950); The Lesson -A Comic Drama (1951); The Chairs - A Tragic Farce (1952); and Jack, or the Submission - A Naturalistic Comedy (1955). In his words - "Theater is not literature... It is simply what cannot be expressed by any other means." We will read from the book The Bald Soprano & Other Plays, trans. Donald M. Allen, Grove Press (1958).

Gail Hubbard’s specialty is French (language, culture, history, & literature). Drama is her favorite genre, especially the Theater of the Absurd.