Revisit beloved classics or experience new ones with Rosenbach courses. Book lovers delve into fiction, history, and poetry with the guidance of a literary expert and the company of other readers. See all upcoming courses.
Thanks to our generous sponsors, scholarships are available for some courses to cover the cost of tuition. To apply for a scholarship, please submit this form.
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Interested in sponsoring a course? Learn more about program and course sponsorship here or email Kelsey Scouten Bates, Director, at [email protected].
Fall 2023 Courses with Available Scholarships
IN-PERSON
Reading Gravity’s Rainbow with Paul Saint-Amour
Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow turns 50 this year. The book divided readers from the beginning: the Pulitzer Prize jury recommended it unanimously, but the Pulitzer board vetoed the recommendation, calling the novel “turgid,” “unreadable,” and “obscene.” In honor of the novel’s golden anniversary, in this course we’ll explore Pynchon’s encyclopedic meditation on whiteness, war, sex, Psy Ops, plastics, corporate capital, the settler state, integrals, disintegration, and the V-2 rocket.
Sponsored by Eleanor and Peter Nalle
ONLINE
Uncle Tom’s Cabin and African American Abolitionists with Edward Whitley
Abraham Lincoln reportedly once called Harriet Beecher Stowe “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”
It’s unlikely that a single novel led to the Civil War, but the depiction of life under slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin did make abolitionism
a mainstream political cause. The novel combines the tropes of 19th-century sentimental literature with ripped-from the-headlines realism that put readers right into the middle of the abolitionist press.
Supported by the Rosenbach Literature Fund
IN-PERSON
Phillis Wheatley with Kirsten Lee
This seminar offers an introduction to Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral and explores how her poetry has been received and memorialized from the 18th century to today. Building on works by Joanna Brooks, Cassander Smith, Brigitte Fielder, and Tara Bynum, participants in this seminar will have the opportunity to discuss Wheatley’s work and learn about the Black feminist legacies of studying her poems. This seminar includes a presentation of the Rosenbach’s first edition of Poems.
Sponsored by Amy Coes and R. Putnam Coes III
ONLINE
Reading Tristram Shandy with Wesley Stace
Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767) is a nine-volume pseudo-memoir, domestic
drama, wild narrative, and linguistic adventure. Both sentimental and bawdy, the book was a publishing sensation: a scandalous, digressive,
and transgressive book written by a canny selfpublicist, who was also, perhaps surprisingly, a vicar. Shandy makes you aware of the page
itself, the act of printing, with its black pages, marbled pages, squiggles, and elaborate punctuation. In this course we will dissect the novel’s creation, reception, and shifting reputation since publication.
Sponsored by Lisa Washington