Agora Foundation Online Intensive -
Middlemarch by George Eliot

“But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.”

How can a hidden life be the subject of an epic?  How can an invisible human being become the subject of history?  To put it another way, what could be the history of a hidden life, and how could a hidden life have one?  But must not all hidden lives have (hidden) histories, or does someone’s history only come to be history when it ceases to be invisible?  How does one inquire about what is invisible?  Or is what is invisible only unseen, i.e., do we confuse a fact with an impossibility?  What is invisible cannot be seen, but what is unseen, after all, may be looked into; that it is unseen may be a fact, but that fact ceases to be a fact when the thing comes to be seen.  The notion of alternate facts – of facts whose contradictories are also facts -- is absurd, but facts by their nature are contingent; they admit of change, in verb tense at least: they go from is to was with the spinning of Time’s whirligig, as will we who read novels and histories and contemplate facts and fictions.  And so it is that George Eliot, presumably the name of a man, but actually the name taken up by a woman named Mary Ann Evans, gives us, in one of the most expansive and beautiful fictions in English, the fact of a woman named Dorothea, whose life is told in front of the glancing backdrop of a woman famous in “the history of man.”  Indeed, is Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life more a fiction, or less a fact, than The Iliad or The Odyssey?  Does its subtitle indicate that it is necessarily less epic?  Must an epic unfold in a metropolis or on a broad canvas?  What’s Achilles to Dorothea or Dorothea to Achilles that she should weep for him -- and not he for her?  Where in the book of nature is it written that the life of woman must be a backwater in the “history of man” or consigned to the oblivion of “mere inconsistency and formlessness?”  Dorothea Brooke’s name changes when she marries, yet she remains Dorothea and always continues Dorothea, not changeless but versatile, not formless but shaped and shapely.  If Virginia Woolf was right to call Middlemarch “the magnificent book which for all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” one can only hope after reading a bit of it to be admitted into that category and to aspire to the perfection of its imperfections, which in style and insight cannot have many equals.

Online seminars will take place over sixteen Tuesday evenings, September 5 through December 19, 5:30-7:00PM Pacific Time. Books will be supplied and sessions will be facilitated by Eric Stull. Groups will be limited to 14 participants and no prior knowledge is required. Teachers will be offered 3 CEU credits for participation.  

-- COMPLETED --

Middlemarch by George Eliot -
Online Intensive
Begins September 5 and ends December 19, 2023

Text:

Middlemarch by George Eliot - Penguin Classics (November 2015), ISBN 978-0143107729

Middlemarch Intensive​ - Dates and Curriculum

1) Session One

Tuesday, September 5

5:30-7:00PM PDT

Prelude, Book 1 - Miss Brooke - ch. 1-6

2) Session Two

Tuesday, September 12

5:30-7:00PM PDT

Book 1 - Miss Brooke - ch. 7-12

3) Session Three

Tuesday, September 19

5:30-7:00PM PDT

Book 2 - Old and Young - ch. 13-17

4) Session Four

Tuesday, September 26

5:30-7:00PM PDT

Book 2 - Old and Young - ch. 18-22

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5) Session Five

Tuesday, October 3

5:30-7:00PM PDT

Book 3 - Waiting for Death - ch. 23-27

6) Session Six

Tuesday, October 10

5:30-7:00PM PDT

Book 3 - Waiting for Death - ch. 28-33

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7) Session Seven

Tuesday, October 17

5:30-7:00PM PDT

Book 4 - Three Love Problems - ch. 34-37

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8) Session Eight

Tuesday, October 24

5:30-7:00PM PDT

Book 4 - Three Love Problems - ch. 38-42

9) Session Nine

Tuesday, October 31

5:30-7:00PM PDT

Book 5 - The Dead Hand - ch. 43-48

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10) Session Ten

Tuesday, November 7

5:30-7:00PM PST

Book 5 - The Dead Hand - ch. 49-53

11) Session Eleven

Tuesday, November 14

5:30-7:00PM PST

Book 6 - The Widow and the Wife - ch. 54-57

12) Session Twelve

Tuesday, November 21

5:30-7:00PM PST

Book 6 - The Widow and the Wife - ch. 58-62

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13) Session Thirteen

Tuesday, November 28

5:30-7:00PM PST

Book 7 - Two Temptations - ch. 63-67

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14) Session Fourteen

Tuesday, December 5

5:30-7:00PM PST

Book 7 - Two Temptations - ch. 68-71 

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15) Session Fifteen

Tuesday, December 12

5:30-7:00PM PST

Book 8 - Sunset and Sunrise - ch. 72-80

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16) Session Sixteen

Tuesday, December 19

5:30-7:00PM PST

Book 8 - Sunset and Sunrise - ch. 81-86, Finale