This year’s Winter Weekend selection, Stendhal’s The Red and the Black follows a young intellectual man from a provincial town who tries to make it in 19th century Paris. Stendhal’s psychological portrait of Julien Sorel and his love affairs mesh well with a satiric depiction of religious and society life.
Charles Calhoun, independent scholar for the Maine Humanities Council presented a lecture entitled “How To Lose Your Head When All About Are Keeping Theirs: Julien, Mathilde, and the Agony of Romanticism.”
The Council’s annual Winter Weekend, a humanities seminar on a classic text, provides an opportunity for readers to confront, in a group setting, an important work of literature. Held at Bowdoin College in early March, the program begins with a Friday evening lecture and dinner (a gastronomic taste of the time and culture reflected in the chosen text). The group reconvenes Saturday on various aspects of the book, from cultural context, to critical analysis, to explorations of specific themes.
Winter Weekend 2011 took place March 11 and 12, 2011 at Bowdoin College.
How To Lose Your Head When All About Are Keeping Theirs: Julien, Mathilde, and the Agony of Romanticism[ 55:44 ]Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (3174)
The Council’s annual Winter Weekend, a humanities seminar on a classic text, provides an opportunity for readers to confront, in a group setting, an important work of literature. Held at Bowdoin College in early March, the program begins with a Friday evening lecture and dinner (a gastronomic taste of the time and culture reflected in the chosen text). The group reconvenes Saturday on various aspects of the book, from cultural context, to critical analysis, to explorations of specific themes.
This year’s selection, George Eliot’s Middlemarch is an English masterpiece the follows the social and intellectual lives of very human characters in a small provincial town.
Charles Calhoun, the charming Scholar in Residence at the Maine Humanities Council presented second on Saturday morning with a lecture entitled “Why Was There No British Revolution? The Political Economy of Middlemarch.
Winter Weekend 2010 took place March 12 and 13, 2010 at Bowdoin College.
Charles Calhoun is an independent historian and biographer who is Scholar in Residence at the Maine Humanities Council. He is working on books about Longfellow and Whitman in Civil War Washington and on the history of horsemanship in North America. Born in Monroe, Louisiana, he studied history at the University of Virginia and law at Christ Church, Oxford; he now lives in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Here, he discusses the death of Prince Andrei, with reference to other deaths in other wars.
This talk was part of the Winter Weekend seminar on Tolstoy’s War and Peace in March 2009. Download the related handout as a Word document.
Charles Calhoun is Scholar in Residence at the Maine Humanities Council. He is the author of Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life (2004), A Small College in Maine: 200 Years of Bowdoin (1993), and the volume on Maine in the Compass American Guide Series (4th ed., 2005). Born in Monroe, Louisiana, he studied history at the University of Virginia and law at Christ Church, Oxford. In this talk, Calhoun identifies storytelling techniques (such as suspense, fulfillment, gratification, and apt quotation) that biographers can adopt in their own writing. With input from Teaching American History Through Biography participants, he analyzes passages from three contemporary biographies—Claire Tomalin’s Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, Blanche Wiesen Cook’s Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 1: 1884-1933, and Peter Guralnick’s Searching for Robert Thompson—for examples of these techniques.
This talk was part of the 2008 Teaching American History teacher program in Brunswick, Maine. What do you think of Charles’ answer to the question of what makes a good biography, and what would your answer be? Please leave your thoughts here.
Please be aware that the content in these audio files does not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or policies of the Maine Humanities Council or any organization with which the Maine Humanities Council is affiliated. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in the podcast do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
This year’s Winter Weekend selection, Stendhal’s The Red and the Black follows a young intellectual man from a provincial town who tries to make it in 19th century Paris. Stendhal’s psychological portrait of Julien Sorel and his love affairs mesh well with a satiric depiction of religious and society life.
How To Lose Your Head When All About Are Keeping Theirs: Julien, Mathilde, and the Agony of Romanticism [ 55:44 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (3174)
