LEADER
David Schmitt can’t quite believe he’s been leading and reading Great Books for as long as he has. He’s an architect, a tutor, and a professional Great Books leader and semi-professional good deeds doer. Living just outside Chicago, he has managed to convince Beth, his wife, that she is happily married.
READINGS
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
(Penguin Classics 2014)
ISBN 978-0143107323
James by Percival Everett
(Doubleday/Penguin Random House, 2024)
ISBN-13: 978-385550369
SEMINAR OVERVIEW
“At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive.” James: A Novel
The concept of the Great Conversation is a well-known idea about how great books speak to each other as they speak to us. I am not aware of two books that are in closer conversation with each other than Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Percival Everett’s James. Not only that, but James speaks with Voltaire and Locke directly!
I’ve loved Huck Finn and the way he clumsily makes his way to realize himself a moral person ever since I first encountered him. There was a time, when I was just a wee lad, when I was smitten with all that Twain wrote, HF in particular. Huckleberry Finn is as entertaining as you might expect from Twain, but probably deeper (and more flawed) than you may first think. Hemingway claimed “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” You will be the judge.
James is, in my opinion, a spectacular novel. James, the character, is created molecule by molecule in Percival Everett’s novel, not as a reimagined Jim, but as the James we could not know from HF. James is fully formed and fully inhabits an imaginary world that is more real in many ways than what was. Both novels deal with language and its uses, and how language can be a tool of domination and its destruction. Splendid!
These are historical novels that speak directly to our time, our place, and our morality. I hope you will join in this discussion, as we eavesdrop on their great conversation.
Toronto Pursuits pricing options
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Toronto Pursuits 2025
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