Term 03 THE VIEW FROM THE WASTELAND: BRIDESHEAD TO PASTORALIA 10am - 12noon Aug 11 - Sept 15 2010
Dr Robert Tilley;T.S.Eliot's The Waste Land captured the very modern feeling of despondency and decay, but in its despair it also captured a sense of mystical ennui. Its lines whispers of a hope against hope. Evelyn Waugh was a great admirer of Eliot, and opened his work A Handful of Dust with a quotation from the Waste Land, and in Brideshead Revisited it is this poem that Anthony Blanche reads aloud through a megaphone on Sebastian's balcony at Oxford. There is in both these works a sense of mystical despair, of things passing and yet, for all of that, something other, something sacred, something that makes its presence felt.
This series asks, how do authors respond to the disenchantment of a world made empty by a vacuous modernity? More importantly for us, how do authors respond to a world that seems to be no longer empty, but is instead filled by the products and diversions of hyper-consumerism? We look at a number of authors, but most of all we study the writing of George Saunders who captures well the horror of the inanity of our consumer world, but nevertheless is able to capture the glimmer of the spark of soul. Which is to say, the optimistic sense that there still survives that which is truly human. No matter how much our world distracts us, God moves in many diverse and various ways.
Contact: secretary@aquinas-academy.com
Details
Cost: $150/person (Including notes)
Where: Level 5 141 Harrington Street Sydney
When: 6 Monday mornings, 10am - 12noon, August 9 - September 13, 2010