In Baldwin’s 1956 classic about a repressed American man who moves to Paris in order to live his complex sexuality more freely—a trajectory that mimics the one followed by Baldwin himself—the characters’ restless journeying between cities, continents, and cultures becomes a metaphor for a striving after emotional liberation. David, a closeted bisexual with profound anxieties about masculinity, flees the Brooklyn of his childhood and adolescence for France, where he oscillates between affairs with women and a romance with a doomed Italian waiter: Giovanni, whose darkened room is both a place of stillness and safety and, finally, a symbol of David’s inability to integrate his sexuality successfully.
Schedule
Three Wednesdays: February 7, 14, 21
About “Journeys”
Tales of exciting—and often perilous—journeys away from home have been a staple of storytelling ever since Homer’s Odyssey introduced the figure of the wandering hero to Western Literature. In this series of 5 weekly seminars, Daniel Mendelsohn, the New York Review’s Editor-at-Large, will lead participants through readings of five works in which journeys and voyages become vehicles for exploring the self and the world, language and art, time and mortality. The first seminar, devoted to the Odyssey itself—the model in so many ways for all subsequent travel writing in the European tradition—will be followed by four seminars devoted to twentieth-century works by Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, W. G. Sebald, and Rachel Cusk. Meetings will take the form of both lectures with Q&A sessions and more intimate online seminars in which Mendelsohn, after delivering opening remarks and observations, will invite participants to a wider discussion.
You may read descriptions of all five seminars here.
About Daniel Mendelsohn
Daniel Mendelsohn, the Editor-at-Large of The New York Review of Books, is an award-winning critic, author, essayist, and translator. His books include An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic and three collections of essays and reviews, including Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture and Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones, both published by New York Review Books. Mr. Mendelsohn is the Charles Ranlet Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College and the Director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable trust that supports writers of nonfiction, essay, and criticism.
