Thursdays 9:30 – 11:30 AM
September 30 through November 4, 2004
D.O.C. House
This course will cover Phillip Roth’s trilogy: I Married a Communist, for which he won the Ambassador Book Award of the English Speaking Union, American Pastoral, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize, and The Human Stain, for which he won his second Pen/Faulkner Award. We will spend two weeks on each novel. Those who plan to take the course should be prepared to discuss the first novel at the first week of discussion. While all literature is rooted in time and place, Roth’s writing captures the spirit of the time in which the action occurs as a social history.
“I love teaching literature. I am rarely ever so contented as when I am here with my pages of notes, and my marked up notes, and with people like yourselves. To my mind there is nothing like the classroom in all of life. Sometimes when we are in the midst of talking, when one of you, say, has pierced with a single phrase right to the heart of the book at hand – I want to cry out, ‘Dear Friends, cherish this.’ Why? Because once you have left here people are rarely, if ever, going to talk to you the way you talk and listen to one another and to me in this bright and barren little room.” (Professor of Desire by Phillip Roth)
Class is limited to 25 participants
ESTELLE DIAMOND has a BA and a Mat in English from Binghamton University. She has taught nine courses at ILEAD. At present she is a representative from Hanover to the New Hampshire State House.
