Maine Humanities Council

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.

Why Was There No British Revolution? [ 1:00:34 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (8929)

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.

Amy A Kass, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and senior lecturer in the humanities at the University of Chicago opened Saturday’s program with her lecture entitled “Sympathy, Love and Marriage: Effective Reform in Middlemarch“.

Winter Weekend 2010 took place March 12 and 13, 2010 at Bowdoin College.

Sympathy, Love and Marriage [ 1:02:48 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (10573)

James T. Morgan was a long-time friend and colleague at The Opera Company of Boston of the late Sarah Caldwell, the most innovative opera director of mid-20th-century America and the first woman to conduct at the Metropolitan Opera. He worked with Caldwell on a production of the War and Peace opera by Sergei Prokofiev (pictured at right), which he described in this Winter Weekend talk. Morgan moved to Maine in 1999 and became director of development and marketing for PCA Great Performances. He now serves on its board and the board of the Bowdoin International Music Festival. He lives in Freeport.

This talk was part of the Winter Weekend seminar on Tolstoy’s War and Peace in March 2009.

Prokofiev's War and Peace [ 49:43 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (4451)

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.

Sheila McCarthy is Associate Professor of Russian at Colby College. She has a B.A. in Russian from Emmanuel College, an M.A. from Harvard in Russian Area Studies, and a Ph.D. from Cornell University in Russian literature. She teaches 19th-century Russian literature in Russian and in English. Here, she performs a close reading of three dance scenes in War and Peace as a way of exploring Tolstoy’s opinion of art.

This talk was part of the Winter Weekend seminar on Tolstoy’s War and Peace in March 2009.

Shall We Dance? A Close Reading [ 38:58 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (4659)

Justin Weir is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He received a B.A. in Russian from the University of Minnesota and his master’s and doctoral degree in Russian literature from Northwestern University. He is co-editor and co-translator of Eight Twentieth-Century Russian Plays (2000) and author of The Author as Hero: Self and Tradition in Bulgakov, Pasternak, and Nabokov (2002). His book Leo Tolstoy and the Alibi of Narrative is due out from Yale University Press in spring 2010.

This talk was part of the Winter Weekend seminar on Tolstoy’s War and Peace in March 2009.

Love and War in War and Peace [ 1:09:06 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (6606)