The Newberry Seminars Program is grounded in the idea that people enjoy learning in small classes through an open exchange of knowledge and conversation. Our program offers a stimulating series of non-credit, adult education classes that encourage dialogue on subjects in the humanities that relate to the Newberry’s vast collections. Experts teach literature, music, history, philosophy, religion, language, genealogy, and creative writing in the classrooms of one of the world’s premier research and reference libraries.
Seminars differ in size, duration, cost, and format. The Seminars Program includes three terms:
- Winter/Spring: mid-February through early May
- Summer: June through early August
- Fall: mid-September through early December
For a list of this term’s course offerings, please view our Seminar Schedule
Newberry Seminars
Hopkins explores the huge range of media employed by both Dada and Surrealism (collage, painting, found objects, performance art, photography, film), whilst at the same time establishing the aesthetic differences between the movements. He also examines the Dadaist obsession with the body-as-mechanism in relation to the Surrealists' return to the fetishized/eroticized body.
"Reviews and Criticism" includes twelve major interpretations of the novel, nine of them new to the Fourth Edition. New contributors include Jan Fergus, Patricia Meyer Spacks, Tony Tanner, Maaja Stewart, D. A. Miller, Emily Auerbach, Gabrielle D. V. White, Richard Jenkyns, and David Monaghan.
A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.
With notes and an afterword by Robert Chandler and Olga Meerson In Andrey Platonov's The Foundation Pit, a team of workers has been given the job of digging the foundation of an immense edifice, a palatial home for the perfect future that, they are convinced, is at hand. But the harder the team works, the deeper they dig, the more things go wrong, and it becomes clear that what is being dug is not a foundation but an immense grave. The Foundation Pit is Platonov's most overtly political book, written in direct response to the staggering brutalities of Stalin's collectivization of Russian agriculture. It is also a literary masterpiece. Seeking to evoke unspeakable realities, Platonov deforms and transforms language in pages that echo both with the alienating doublespeak of power and the stark simplicity of prayer. This English translation is the first and only one to be based on the definitive edition published by Pushkin House in Moscow. It includes extensive notes and, in an appendix, several striking passages deleted by Platonov. Robert Chandler and Olga Meerson's afterword discusses the historical context and style of Platonov's most haunted and troubling work.
A quick reference guide to accredited methods, research strategies, U.S. record groups and more! Also find charts & forms, style sheets, checklists and steps to The Genealogy Organizational Challenge!
Wish you could study the Internet for a couple of years to find useful tools that will help you enjoy more success in your genealogical pursuits? Well Marsha has done just that for you! Benefit from advice on using some of the latest genealogical tools in analysis, education, health, organization, presentations, research and more!
A special 50th anniversary edition of the magnificent Pulitzer Prize-winning classic from N. Scott Momaday, with a new preface by the author
A young Native American, Abel has come home from war to find himself caught between two worlds. The first is the world of his grandfather's, wedding him to the rhythm of the seasons, the harsh beauty of the land, and the ancient rites and traditions of his people. But the other world--modern, industrial America--pulls at Abel, demanding his loyalty, claiming his soul, and goading him into a destructive, compulsive cycle of depravity and disgust.
Beautifully rendered and deeply affecting, House Made of Dawn has moved and inspired readers and writers for the last fifty years. It remains, in the words of The Paris Review, "both a masterpiece about the universal human condition and a masterpiece of Native American literature."
THE STORY: Most persons are familiar with the story of Joan of Arc, so it is necessary only to say that this is a play within a play, the outer play (as it were) showing a group of actors in rehearsal on a bare stage, preparing to produce a Joan of Arc play. The story of Joan’s visions and pilgrimage to court, her restoring faith to the French and the victory she wins, are beautifully dramatized. But Anderson has woven into the Joan story a parallel action, which takes place outside the Joan play proper, in which he shows the meaning of faith today and the necessity of believing in something. The actress who plays Joan claims that the role should show her never compromising her ideals, and she is ready to leave the cast because she thinks the part and the direction of herself shows Joan doing just that. But she learns, from her director and fellow players, that life is a series of compromises, and that she herself, as an actress, like the historical Joan, can and should give in on small things in order to achieve the greatest good in a larger sense. In acting her part through to the end, she learns the lesson that Joan taught the world, of great faith and idealism, tempered by reality and the acceptance of the necessary limitations which are in all of us.
"Criticism" includes twenty-eight essays about the novels sure to promote classroom discussion. Contributors include Leo Marx, Elizabeth Hardwick, Frederick Busch, Robert Lowell, Herschel Parker, Carolyn L. Karcher, Thomas Mann, and Hannah Arendt.
A Selected Bibliography is included.
"This slim book--seven essays, punctuated by enigmatic, haunting paintings by Ana Teresa Fernandez--hums with power and wit."--Boston Globe
"The antidote to mansplaining."--The Stranger
"Feminist, frequently funny, unflinchingly honest and often scathing in its conclusions."--Salon
"Solnit tackles big themes of gender and power in these accessible essays. Honest and full of wit, this is an integral read that furthers the conversation on feminism and contemporary society."--San Francisco Chronicle Top Shelf
"Solnit [is] the perfect writer to tackle the subject: her prose style is so clear and cool."--The New Republic
"The terrain has always felt familiar, but Men Explain Things To Me is a tool that we all need in order to find something that was almost lost."--National Post
In her comic, scathing essay, "Men Explain Things to Me," Rebecca Solnit took on what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women. She wrote about men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don't, about why this arises, and how this aspect of the gender wars works, airing some of her own hilariously awful encounters.
This updated edition with two new essays of this national bestseller book features that now-classic essay as well as "#YesAllWomen," an essay written in response to 2014 Isla Vista killings and the grassroots movement that arose with it to end violence against women and misogyny, and the essay "Cassandra Syndrome." This book is also available in hardcover.
Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of eighteen or so books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including the books Men Explain Things to Me and Hope in the Dark, both also with Haymarket; a trilogy of atlases of American cities; The Faraway Nearby; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at Harper's and a regular contributor to the Guardian.
In her comic, scathing essay, "Men Explain Things to Me," Rebecca Solnit took on what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women. She wrote about men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don't, about why this arises, and how this aspect of the gender wars works, airing some of her own hilariously awful encounters.
This updated edition with two new essays of this national bestseller book features that now-classic essay as well as "#YesAllWomen," an essay written in response to 2014 Isla Vista killings and the grassroots movement that arose with it to end violence against women and misogyny, and the essay "Cassandra Syndrome." This book is also available in hardcover.
Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of eighteen or so books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including the books Men Explain Things to Me and Hope in the Dark, both also with Haymarket; a trilogy of atlases of American cities; The Faraway Nearby; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at Harper's and a regular contributor to the Guardian.
For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
- A new edition of one of Eliot's best-loved novels whose central figure, Maggie Tulliver, is one of English literature's great female characters
- A compelling story of a young girl's growth to adulthood, and the conflicts that arise from her growing independence
- New introduction emphasizes Eliot's significance as a writer of fiction, and the literary qualities that have sometimes been overshadowed by her interest in philosophical ideas. It examines the importance of reading in the novel, its preoccupation with gender, and complex relationship with feminism
- Full notes identify allusions and the significance in particular of literary references, and also pay attention to significant textual changes between manuscript and successive editions
- Use the definitive Clarendon text of the novel
- Up-to-date Bibliography
New to this Edition:
- Introduction by Juliette Atkinson, informed by the latest critical and scholarly thinking on the novel
- New and expanded Notes
- Up-to-date Select Bibliography
- Re-set text retains the defnitive Clarendon text and improves print appearance
As selected by the author, Opened Ground includes the essential work from Heaney's twelve previous books of poetry, as well as new sequences drawn from two of his landmark translations, The Cure at Troy and Sweeney Astray, and several previously uncollected poems. Heaney's voice is like no other--by turns mythological and journalistic, rural and sophisticated, reminiscent and impatient, stern and yielding, curt and expansive (Helen Vendler, The New Yorker)--and this is a one-volume testament to the musicality and precision of that voice. The book closes with Heaney's Nobel Lecture: Crediting Poetry.
An accessible, contemporary guide to the art of dramatic writing
During the ten years that Stuart Spencer has taught playwriting, he has struggled to find an effective playwriting handbook for his courses. Although most of the currently popular handbooks have good ideas in them, they all suffer from the same problems: they're poorly organized; are composed mostly of quirky, idiosyncratic advice on how specific playwrights have gone about writing their own work; and are full of abstract theorizing on the nature of art. As a result, they fail to offer any concrete information on how to construct a well-written play or any useful guidelines and exercises. Moreover, few of these books are actually written by working playwrights. Out of frustration, Spencer wrote his own book. The result, The Playwright's Guidebook, is a clear, concise, and engaging handbook. Spencer addresses the important principles of structure, includes insightful writing exercises that build upon one another, explores the creative process, and troubleshoots recurrent problems that playwrights actually face.Proof is the winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
One of the most acclaimed plays of the 1999-2000 season, Proof is a work that explores the unknowability of love as much as it does the mysteries of science.
One of the most acclaimed plays of the 1999-2000 season, Proof is a work that explores the unknowability of love as much as it does the mysteries of science.
It focuses on Catherine, a young woman who has spent years caring for her father, Robert, a brilliant mathematician in his youth who was later unable to function without her help. His death has brought into her midst both her sister, Claire, who wants to take Catherine back to New York with her, and Hal, a former student of Catherine's father who hopes to find some hint of Robert's genius among his incoherent scribblings. The passion that Hal feels for math both moves and angers Catherine, who, in her exhaustion, is torn between missing her father and resenting the great sacrifices she made for him. For Catherine has inherited at least a part of her father's brilliance -- and perhaps some of his instability as well. As she and Hal become attracted to each other, they push at the edges of each other's knowledge, considering not only the unpredictability of genius but also the human instinct toward love and trust.
In this version of the story of Joan of Arc, Brecht transforms her into 'Joan Dark', a member of the 'Black Straw Hats' (a Salvation Army-like group) in twentieth century Chicago. The play charts Joan's battle with Pierpont Mauler, the unctuous owner of a meat-packing plant. Like her predecessor, Joan is a doomed woman, a martyr and (initially, at least) an innocent in a world of strike-breakers, fat cats, and penniless workers. Like many of Brecht's plays it is laced with humor and songs as part of its epic dramaturgical structure.
The play, which was never staged in Brecht's lifetime, is published here with a new translation, a full introduction and Brecht's own notes on the text.In this version of the story of Joan of Arc, Brecht transforms her into 'Joan Dark', a member of the 'Black Straw Hats' (a Salvation Army-like group) in twentieth century Chicago. The play charts Joan's battle with Pierpont Mauler, the unctuous owner of a meat-packing plant. Like her predecessor, Joan is a doomed woman, a martyr and (initially, at least) an innocent in a world of strike-breakers, fat cats, and penniless workers. Like many of Brecht's plays it is laced with humor and songs as part of its epic dramaturgical structure.
In the six centuries since her martyrdom, Joan of Arc has inspired artists, musicians, and writers. Shaw's heroine is unlike any previous interpretation -- not a witch, saint, or madwoman but a pre-feminist icon, possessed of innate intelligence and leadership qualities that challenge the authority of church and state. She is also a real human being, warm and sincere, whose flaws include an obstinacy that leads to her undoing. This edition includes a substantial, informative Preface by the author.
A Penguin Classic With Saint Joan, which distills many of the ideas Shaw had been exploring in earlier works on politics, religion, feminism, and creative evolution, he reached the height of his fame as a dramatist. Fascinated by the story of Joan of Arc, but unhappy with the way she had traditionally been depicted, Shaw wanted to remove "the whitewash which disfigures her beyond recognition." He presents a realistic Joan: proud, intolerant, naïve, foolhardy, and brave--a rebel and a woman for Shaw's time and our own. This is the definitive text under the editorial supervision of Dan H. Laurence. The volume includes Shaw's Preface of 1924; the cast list of the first production of Saint Joan; a chronology; and the essay "On Playing Joan" by Imogen Stubbs.
A new edition of the later selected work of a Nobel Prize-winning poet
Often considered to be the greatest poet of our age (The Guardian), Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past. He saw poetry as a vocation and credited it with the power to persuade the vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values. Paul Muldoon wrote that Heaney was the only poet I can think of who was recognized worldwide as having moral as well as literary authority.
Shortly before his death in 2013, Seamus Heaney began to compile Selected Poems 1988-2013, and although he was unable to complete the project, his choices have been followed here. This volume encapsulates the finest work from Seeing Things (1991) with its lines of loss and revelation; The Spirit Level (1996) where we experience the poem as ploughshare that turns time / Up and over.; the landmark translation of Beowulf (1999); Electric Light (2001), a book of origins and oracles; and his final collections, District and Circle (2006) and Human Chain (2010), which limn the interconnectedness of being, our lifelines to our inherited past.
Fourteen judiciously selected critical essays address Poe's poetry, fiction, politics, and psychology. Contributors include Floyd Stovall, Robert C. McLean, Richard Wilbur, James W. Gargano, Joseph J. Moldenhauer, Paul John Eakin, Grace Farrell, Liahna Klenman Babener, Barton Levi St. Armand, Joseph N. Riddel, J. Gerald Kennedy, John Carlos Rowe, Terence Whalen, and John T. Irwin.
A Selected Bibliography is also included.
Edgar Allan Poe’s works, with their gothic and often obsessive themes, have had a significant influence on American literature.
In this Norton Critical Edition, G. R. Thompson has fully introduced, annotated, and edited each text.
“Backgrounds and Contexts” includes fifty-seven carefully chosen documents that illuminate Poe’s prolific but short career, among them reviews, prefaces, and correspondence by Poe as well as thematic pieces dealing with Transcendentalism and alternative romanticism, sciences of the mind, sensation fiction, and the South and slavery.
Fourteen judiciously selected critical essays address Poe’s poetry, fiction, politics, and psychology. Contributors include Floyd Stovall, Robert C. McLean, Richard Wilbur, James W. Gargano, Joseph J. Moldenhauer, Paul John Eakin, Grace Farrell, Liahna Klenman Babener, Barton Levi St. Armand, Joseph N. Riddel, J. Gerald Kennedy, John Carlos Rowe, Terence Whalen, and John T. Irwin.
A Selected Bibliography is also included.
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
The masterful collection from the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Wild Iris and Vita Nova
Louise Glück has long practiced poetry as a species of clairvoyance. She began as Cassandra, at a distance, in league with the immortal; to read her books sequentially is to chart the oracle's metamorphosis into unwilling vessel, reckless, mortal and crude. The Seven Ages is Glück's ninth book, her strangest and most bold. In it she stares down her own death, and, in doing do, forces endless superimpositions of the possible on the impossible--an act that simultaneously defies and embraces the inevitable, and is, finally, mimetic. over and over, at each wild leap or transformation, flames shoot up the reader's spine.
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
The masterful collection from the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Wild Iris and Vita Nova
Louise Glück has long practiced poetry as a species of clairvoyance. She began as Cassandra, at a distance, in league with the immortal; to read her books sequentially is to chart the oracle’s metamorphosis into unwilling vessel, reckless, mortal and crude. The Seven Ages is Glück’s ninth book, her strangest and most bold. In it she stares down her own death, and, in doing do, forces endless superimpositions of the possible on the impossible—an act that simultaneously defies and embraces the inevitable, and is, finally, mimetic. over and over, at each wild leap or transformation, flames shoot up the reader’s spine.
Superior Donuts takes place in the historic Uptown neighborhood of Chicago, where Arthur Przybyszewski runs the donut shop that has been in his family for sixty years. Franco Wicks, a young black man and Arthur's only employee, wants to modernize the shop, while Arthur is more content to spend the day smoking weed and reminiscing about his Polish immigrant father. This provocative comedy, set in the heart of one of Chicago's most diverse communities, explores the challenges of embracing the past and the redemptive power of friendship.
Tracy Letts was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Award for Best Play for August: Osage County, which premiered at Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 2007 before playing Broadway, London's National Theatre, and a forty-week US tour. Other plays include Pulitzer Prize finalist Man from Nebraska; Killer Joe, which was adapted into a critically acclaimed film; and Bug, which has played in New York, Chicago, and London and was adapted into a film. Letts is an ensemble member of Steppenwolf Theatre Company and garnered a Tony Award for his performance in the Broadway revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Set Requirements: Interior
An irresistible comedy with thrills and derring do set in the news room. Hildy wants to break away from journalism and go on a belated honeymoon. There is a jailbreak and into Hildy's hands falls the escapee as hostage. He conceals his prize in a rolltop desk and phones his scoop to his managing editor. Their job is to prevent other reporters and the sheriff from opening the desk and finding their story. Some hoods are enli
When Blue Bird and her grandmother leave their family’s camp to gather beans for the long, threatening winter, they inadvertently avoid the horrible fate that befalls the rest of the family. Luckily, the two women are adopted by a nearby Dakota community and are eventually integrated into their kinship circles. Ella Cara Deloria’s tale follows Blue Bird and her daughter, Waterlily, through the intricate kinship practices that created unity among her people.
Waterlily, published after Deloria’s death and generally viewed as the masterpiece of her career, offers a captivating glimpse into the daily life of the nineteenth-century Sioux. This new Bison Books edition features an introduction by Susan Gardner and an index.
Wonderfully sardonic and slyly humorous, the writings of landmark American feminist and socialist thinker Charlotte Perkins Gilman were penned in response to her frustrations with the gender-based double standard that prevailed in America as the twentieth century began. Perhaps best known for her chilling depiction of a woman's mental breakdown in her unforgettable 1892 short story 'The Yellow Wall-Paper', Gilman also wrote Herland, a wry novel that imagines a peaceful, progressive country from which men have been absent for two thousand years. Both are included in this volume, along with a selection of Gilman's major short stories and her poems. New York Times bestselling author Kate Bolick contributes an illuminating introduction that explores Gilman's fascinating yet complicated life.