Course | A Culinary Comedy of Manners

Registration

• Tuition for this course is $250
• Rosenbach members receive a 10% discount on tuition. If you have questions about discounted tuition please call (215) 732-1600 x 138 or email [email protected].
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Description

A course for those who like to read, and like to eat, and like to laugh. The Culinary Comedy of Manners takes us on a three century tour exploring three comic plays that satirize the follies and eccentricities of the upper classes. While in this course, we’ll also sample the gastronomic delights of each time period in a way that connects the food to our literary conversation. We will meet at The Rosenbach for three sessions, in which your professor will bring specially prepared period food to sample.  The last session will meet at the Culinary Literacy Center of the Free Library of Philadelphia for a cooking demonstration of the foods enjoyed throughout the course.

Although the authors of these plays were satirizing the manners of their own societies, these works still sparkle with relevance today, in how they use wit to skewer issues of money, desire and falsehood.  We are still fascinated with “how the other half lives.”  By examining these plays, we also uncover our own manners.

The plays we’ll read:

Moliere’s Tartuffe

Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals

Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest

Syllabus

Culinary Comedy of Manners syllabus 

About the Instructors

Daniel Asher Wolkow has been teaching at the collegiate level for twenty years in Literature and Theatre. He spent ten years as the head of Theatre and Administrator of the Performing Art Center at Eastern New Mexico University-Roswell where he taught acting and stage production. He also directed the campus productions which included, “The Importance of Being Earnest”, “Endgame”, “True West” and “Dracula”.

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