The Last Seminar from Our “Political Novel” Series

Edwin Frank on H.G. Wells and Ursula K. Le Guin
Three weekly sessions beginning
Monday, November 3, 2025

Science fiction has exercised a powerful shaping influence on the modern political novel. H.G. Wells’s breakthrough novella The Time Machine exposes the mirage of progress and in The Island of Dr. Moreau, an inspiration for Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as well as Orwell’s Animal Farm, he depicts a dystopia driven both by colonialist exploitation and scientific enlightenment. Taking off from Wells, our final seminar will turn to Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, in which anarchist collectivism and capitalist liberalism vie in the infinitude of outer space.

Three one-hour sessions: November 3, 10, and 17. All sessions will start at 7 PM EST. Full members and auditors will have access to recordings of each session,  which may be viewed after the live sessions conclude.

Register for Wells / Le Guin

Also Available: The Next Seminar from Daniel Mendelsohn’s
“Drama Queens” Series

Daniel Mendelsohn on Greek Tragedy
Three weekly sessions beginning
Wednesday, November 5, 2025

The three great Athenian tragedians—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—gave a powerful new expressiveness and a profound interiority to the heroines of myth. In this three-week course, we’ll cover Agamennon, where Aeschylus gives Clytemnestra a notable complexity, at once deeply sympathetic and horrifyingly violent (week 1); Sophocles’ Electra—a remarkably acute portrayal of Clytemnestra’s traumatized young daughter, Electra (week 2); and Hecuba and Trojan Women by Euripides, famous above all in antiquity for his portrayals of “women on the verge” (week 3).

Three one-hour sessions: November 5, 12, and 19. All sessions will start at 7pm EST. Full members and auditors will have access to recordings of each session,  which may be viewed after the live sessions conclude.

Register for Greek Tragedies

The remaining seminars for “Drama Queens” will resume in 2026, but you may register for them now at the links below.

Madame Bovary and Italian Opera 

Madame Bovary, Lucia di Lammermoor, La Traviata, and Madame Butterfly
Three sessions, starting Wednesday, January 7, 2026

Register for Operas

Twentieth-Century Theater 

Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee
Four sessions, starting Wednesday, January 28, 2026

Register for Twentieth-Century Theater

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