Date
Aug. 13, 2020, 1pm ET
Department
Literature
Instructor
Michael Lista
A young T.S. Eliot wrote: “Someone said: ‘the dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are what we know.” To be a writer is to join a guild that predates even writing, with one storyteller handing down the sacred sentences to another, who would perfect them, and pass them on again. It’s no different today. In this class with poet and art critic Michael Lista, we’ll learn how to read like a writer, by studying those who write most beautifully and piercingly about the art they inherited from others: George Orwell, Clive James, Renata Adler, Erich Auerbach, Susan Sontag, and Vladimir Nabokov. These are writers who found their quarry in the minds of fellow craftsmen, and taught themselves—and us–how to write by reading out loud.
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