Last chance to enroll!
Auditor Memberships are still available to read and study W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn with Daniel Mendelsohn
In the first season of the New York Review’s new series of online seminars, award-winning author and critic Daniel Mendelsohn is leading participants through readings of five works in which journeys and voyages become vehicles for exploring the self and the world, language and art, time and mortality. The fourth seminar in our series, devoted to W. G. Sebalds’s The Rings of Saturn, will be closing for registrations February 28th.
The German author’s 1995 novel follows in the footsteps of a nameless narrator as he takes a long and erratic walking tour of Suffolk. As he moves through landscapes that seem increasingly haunted by violence both natural and man-made, his reflections on everything from the history of silkworm cultivation to the writings of Conrad and Hölderlin to the architecture of the Temple of Jerusalem become a means of ruminating on history, literature, the passage of time, and cultural decay. Sebald’s novel is one of the subjects of Mr. Mendelsohn’s award-winning 2020 book Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate.
Seminars, to be conducted online, will meet weekly. Full Memberships (now sold out) entitle you to participate in the live seminar discussions, add comments to our discussion boards, access ancillary course materials, and receive a one-time 40% discount to NYRB titles. Auditors may listen in to the live seminars, and access the discussion groups and all ancillary course materials. Live sessions are recorded and will be available for up to three months following the initial class.
The seminar series on The Rings of Saturn will consist of four weekly sessions beginning Wednesday, March 6th.
Full Memberships and Auditor Memberships are still available for the final remaining seminar in this inaugural series
Rachel Cusk, Outline and Second Place
April 3, 10, 17, and 24, 2024
The first novel of Cusk’s Outline trilogy brings us full circle with a return to Greece and, not accidentally, to the twinned themes of travel and storytelling that are central to Homer’s Odyssey. We will devote two sessions to Outline, which follows its nameless heroine, a writer, as she voyages to Greece to teach a writing class. The tension between the narrator’s cageyness and the volubility of her interlocutors becomes a fruitful vehicle for thinking about narrative, writing, and gender.
This seminar will conclude with Cusk’s Second Place, which tells the story of a writer, isolating in the countryside with her family, who hosts a disturbing visitor—a story that, while returning to the odyssean themes of the potential dangers of hospitality, inverts many of the tropes of Outline by exploring the nature of immobility.
