F Literature and Drama

F19Y Reading Murder in the Cathedral

Max: 8, Sessions: 5

Tutor / Leader: Mrs Philippa DAVIES

We shall read together and discuss TS Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. You will need your own copy of the play.

Weekly on Mondays 10:30–12:00

11 Oct to 25 Oct, 8 Nov to 15 Nov

Venue: Host’s house. Check your programme for details.

Clashes: C15R E15T F20Z G03U G04V H04W H05X

F20Z Short Stories of Our Time

Max: 10, Sessions: 8

Tutor / Leader: Mr Jim HUNTER

We will read together stories by writers from America, Australia, England, India, Ireland, Italy and South Africa. The collection is edited by the tutor and copies will be available.

Weekly on Mondays 10:30–12:00

11 Oct to 29 Nov

Venue: Host’s house. Check your programme for details.

Clashes: C15R E15T F19Y G03U G04V H04W H05X

F21L Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Max: 10, Sessions: 4

Tutor / Leader: Mr Jim HUNTER

We shall read together this great poem in Simon Armitage’s attractive translation. Here Arthurian legend is highly sophisticated, based on firm Christian principles while relishing worldly pleasures. Best buy, because it prints the original on facing pages, is the Norton edition: ISBN 978-0-393-33415-9, available post-free from thebookdepository.com

Weekly on Mondays 10:30–12:00

24 Jan to 14 Feb

Venue: Host’s house. Check your programme for details.

Clashes: E15T G03U G04V

F22N Reading Gerard Manley Hopkins

Max: 10, Sessions: 5

Tutor / Leader: Mr Jim HUNTER

When Hopkins’s poetry was first published, in 1918—nearly 30 years after his death—it seemed dazzlingly modern. Today he may be best understood as the most brilliant of the Victorians. Our course will tackle his complexities, and will devote a full session to The Wreck of the Deutschland. Any edition of Hopkins’s collected poems will do.

Weekly on Mondays 10:30–12:00

28 Feb to 28 Mar

Venue: Host’s house. Check your programme for details.

Clashes: E15T G03U G04V

F23P Dickens Reading Group

Max: 12, Sessions: 12

Tutor / Leader: Mr John INGRAM

Little Dorrit is the Dickens novel for 2022, one of the weighty novels of his mature years. It is advisable that all of us have read it before the course starts and that we all use the same edition: Penguin Classics edited by Stephen Wall and Helen Small (£8.99).

Weekly on Mondays 14:30–16:30

10 Jan to 28 Mar

Venue: Host’s house. Check your programme for details.

Clashes: B06T B07U B08V E16U E17V J21R

F24R Creative Writing

Max: 6, Sessions: 6

Tutor / Leader: Mrs Mary TELFORD

This is an interest-sharing group for people who enjoy writing. There will be homework at each of the fortnightly sessions and it helps to have it emailed to all members on the Sunday before the Tuesday meeting.

Every 2 weeks on Tuesdays 10:30–12:45

12 Oct to 21 Dec

Venue: Host’s house. Check your programme for details.

Clashes: B09W C16T C17U E18W E20Y F25T F27V G05W J22T M06N M01W M02X

F25T The Poetry and Prose of Dylan Thomas

Max: 10, Sessions: 3

Tutor / Leader: Ms Lynne BROADBENT

‘I wanted to write poetry … because I had fallen in love with words; … What mattered was the sound of them.’ These sessions will explore Dylan Thomas’s images of childhood, his evocative images of nature and his tales of life in a small Welsh town. You will need copies of Dylan Thomas’s poetry; specific poems and prose will be identified nearer the time.

Weekly on Tuesdays 10:45–12:15

12 Oct to 26 Oct

Venue: Hall, St Paul’s and St Martin’s Parish Centre, Church Street, Saint Paul’s, Canterbury. CT1 1NH

Clashes: B09W C16T E18W E19X E20Y F24R G05W J22T M06N M01W M02X

F26U ‘Not quite a landscape; a nook rather’: An English Rural Idyll

Max: 98, Sessions: 1

Tutor / Leader: Prof Malcolm ANDREWS

The fondness for rural nooks and dells characterised Victorian England’s countryside idyll. This lecture explores the ways writers and artists from the late C18 onwards have helped to create and promote this love of the secluded rural spot.

Tuesday 11:00–12:00

2 Nov

Venue: Zoom

Clashes: B09W C16T C17U E18W E19X E20Y F27V G05W J22T M06N M01W M02X

F27V The Culture War

Max: 98, Sessions: 5

Tutor / Leader: Mr David REEKIE

This five-part course is intended to give a broad overview of an extraordinary new ideology which has dominated the news since the murder of George Floyd and the BLM protests. The Social Justice or Woke movement sometimes called ‘Critical Social Justice’, has its origins in Marxism and Postmodernism but has come to focus on race, sex and gender rather than class. It is a fascinating and disturbing movement which explicitly challenges Western Liberalism but which is motivated by an attractive vision of a society of perfect equality and Social Justice.

Weekly on Tuesdays 10:00–11:30

2 Nov to 30 Nov

Venue: Zoom

Clashes: B09W C16T C17U E18W E19X E20Y F24R F26U G05W J22T M06N M01W M02X

F28W Landscape and Poetry in England, 1700–1830

Max: 98, Sessions: 4

Tutor / Leader: Prof Malcolm ANDREWS

Four lectures on landscape and poetry exploring the ways in which poets, artists and other writers from 1700–1830 have celebrated rural life, labour and the landscape in Britain, and explored the relationship between man and nature. Poets include James Thomson (The Seasons, 1730), poets of pastoral and anti-pastoral sentiment (e.g. Alexander Pope), and elegists on deserted villages, fallen cottages and rural change (e.g. Oliver Goldsmith and John Clare), and Wordsworth’s ‘worship of nature’ in ‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798).

Weekly on Tuesdays 11:00–12:00

1 Feb to 22 Feb

Venue: Zoom

Clashes: B10X C16T C18V C19W E19X E20Y G06X J22T M03Y M04Z

F29X Adventures in Classical Greek

Max: 8, Sessions: 20

Tutor / Leader: Dr Virginia WEBB

We shall be continuing our Adventures in Classical Greek using Peter Jones’s ‘The World of Heroes’ as our guide. This term we shall be embarking on the greatest of Greek Tragedies, Oedipus Tyrannus (The King) by Sophocles in the original Greek, but with plenty of help! This is the play which Aristotle chose as the most perfect example of tragedy, where the main protagonist is inescapably trapped by the will of the gods and suffers the consequences of his actions, through no fault of his own. Course requirements: O Level Greek or above, or ongoing experience of the course material.

Weekly on Tuesdays 14:30–16:00

5 Oct to 2 Nov, 16 Nov to 14 Dec, 18 Jan to 15 Feb, 1 Mar to 29 Mar

Venue: Host’s house. Check your programme for details.

Clashes: B11Y B12Z B13L C21Y E18W E21Z F30Y F31Z F32L H06Y J24V K08P

F30Y Russia at War

Max: 10, Sessions: 20

Tutor / Leader: Mr Martin VYE

We shall be reading, in English, War and Peace by Tolstoy: the first grand epic in Russian literature of the modern age. It follows Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, and his disastrous retreat. Russia emerged victorious from that war, but Tolstoy had fought in the Crimean War;and his experiences then shaped his view, embodied in this novel, that governments and rulers do not work for the good of the people, but for their harm.

Weekly on Tuesdays 14:30–16:00

5 Oct to 19 Oct, 2 Nov to 14 Dec, 11 Jan to 15 Mar

Venue: Zoom

Clashes: B11Y B12Z B13L C21Y E18W E21Z F29X F31Z F32L H06Y J23U J24V K08P

F31Z Virgil’s The Aeneid

Max: 8, Sessions: 6

Tutor / Leader: Mr Dermot STEWART

Following Homer’s account of the sack of Troy, and borrowing many of his devices, Virgil constructs a mythic history for Rome’s foundation. Escapes, doomed love, stormy voyages, battles and politics culminate in the deification of Augustus and justify Rome’s position as ‘top country’. We will read the Penguin Classic, translated by David West, and may find time to hear Purcell’s opera ‘Dido and Aeneas’.

Weekly on Tuesdays 14:30–16:30

26 Oct to 30 Nov

Venue: Host’s house. Check your programme for details.

Clashes: B11Y B12Z E18W E21Z F29X F30Y H06Y J23U

F32L Zorba the Greek – Nikos Kazantzakis

Max: 8, Sessions: 6

Tutor / Leader: Mr Dermot STEWART

Kazantzakis created Zorba from some personal experiences. He added Greek Tragedy and Comedy in his 1946 novel, translated for Faber in 1959, just in time for my first trip to Crete. We may find time to see the film with Anthony Quinn and Alan Bates.

Weekly on Tuesdays 14:30–16:00

11 Jan to 15 Feb

Venue: Host’s house. Check your programme for details.

Clashes: B13L C21Y E21Z F29X F30Y H06Y J24V

F33N Truth and Fiction Book Group (on Zoom)

Max: 12, Sessions: 7

Tutor / Leader: Ms Ursula STEIGER

In order to help members after the difficulties of the pandemic, this book group will run both on Zoom and face to face for the next two terms. Here is how it will work.

The Zoom group will meet every last Wednesday of the month from 10.30 am to 12 noon. The face-to-face group will meet every last Thursday of the month from 2.30 to 4 pm.

We will read the same book, making sure that groups take turns in choosing. The October book is Yellow Crocus by Laila Ibrahim. If possible, both groups will try to meet up for an informal get-together.

Wednesdays 10:30–12:00 on the following dates

27 Oct, 24 Nov, 26 Jan, 23 Feb, 30 Mar, 27 Apr, 25 May

Venue: Zoom

Clashes: A13Z A17R C22Z C23L H07Z

F36T Truth and Fiction Book Group (face to face)

Max: 6, Sessions: 7

Tutor / Leader: Ms Ursula STEIGER

In order to help members after the difficulties of the pandemic, this book group will run both on Zoom and face to face for the next two terms. Here is how it will work.

The Zoom group will meet every last Wednesday of the month from 10.30 am to 12 noon. The face-to-face group will meet every last Thursday of the month from 2.30 to 4 pm.

We will read the same book, making sure that groups take turns in choosing. The October book is Yellow Crocus by Laila Ibrahim. If possible, both groups will try to meet up for an informal get-together.

Thursdays 14:30–16:00 on the following dates

28 Oct, 25 Nov, 27 Jan, 24 Feb, 31 Mar, 28 Apr, 26 May

Venue: Host’s house. Check your programme for details.

Clashes: B18U E22L E23N H10P H11R H12T

F34P Creative Writing Inspired by Art (no experience necessary)

Max: 8, Sessions: 5

Tutor / Leader: To be confirmed

We will use known works of art to spark our imagination and inspire our short story writing. A 1000-word fictional piece is written every two weeks. We will work together to examine structure, style, dialogue and characterisation within the short story form. Members will read out and receive written feedback from the group on their work.

Every 2 weeks on Thursdays 10:15–12:30

14 Oct to 9 Dec

Venue: To be confirmed

Clashes: B14N C24N F35R J27Y J28Z

F35R Being A King: Shakespeare’s Richard II, Henry IV (Parts 1 and 2), Henry V

Max: 10, Sessions: 9

Tutor / Leader: Mr Stuart HUTCHINSON

How does a king prove his legitimacy? Is it from God, or by having the strongest army? As Shakespeare probes these questions, how do his plays develop? Participants will be expected to read the plays in advance, and to bring to our meetings a text with numbered lines.

Weekly on Thursdays 10:30–12:00

25 Nov to 16 Dec, 13 Jan to 10 Feb

Venue: St Andrew’s United Reformed Church, Canterbury. CT1 2UA

Clashes: B14N B15P B16R B17T C25P C26R F34P H09N J28Z

F37U Shakespeare on Stage and Page

Max: 15, Sessions: 8

Tutor / Leader: Dr Yvonne WILLIAMS

Generations of schoolchildren have been introduced to Shakespeare through A Midsummer Night’s Dream. However, this multi-layered, sophisticated comedy richly rewards an adult approach. In Measure for Measure Shakespeare explores the relationship between power and sexuality in ways that challenge, amuse and provoke.

Weekly on Fridays 10:30–12:00

15 Oct to 3 Dec

Venue: Ashford Road Community Hall, Thanington, Canterbury, CT1 3XR

Clashes: B19V B20W C27T C28U F38V H13U H14V

F38V Wide Sargasso Sea

Max: 10, Sessions: 6

Tutor / Leader: Mrs Carol STEWART

We shall read and discuss this ‘prequel’ to Jane Eyre mainly on its own merits, but the first session will examine Mr Rochester and his first marriage as outlined by Charlotte Bronte. Jean Rhys’s background and experience give a different perspective. You will need copies both of Jane Eyre and of The Wide Sargasso Sea. I shall use Penguin editions. Reading for homework!

Weekly on Fridays 10:30–12:00

22 Oct to 26 Nov

Venue: Host’s house. Check your programme for details.

Clashes: B19V B20W C27T C28U F37U H13U H14V