OLLI101650 - WAR AND PEACE [In person at TUCC]

Course Description

WAR AND PEACE

Instructor: Toby Zinman

Day of Week: Tuesday

Dates: Feb 4 – April 8 (no class March 4)

Time: 1:30 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.

Location: In-person at TUCC

As somebody said, “If life could write, it would write like Tolstoy.” Reading this novel is like discovering you’re part of an enormous family, and, as Tolstoy tells us in the first line of his Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Considered by many to be the world’s greatest novel, Tolstoy’s giant book offers many pleasures, not the least of which is bragging rights in having actually read it all the way through.

It isn’t difficult, just long, giving us plenty of material for an 8-week course—especially if we add the contemporary musical, “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet” and the movie versions of W&P, plus various other amusing add-ons.

The plan will be to read an assigned chunk each week and then discuss it. Sometimes we’ll consider the broad sweep, sometimes the small detail. I’ll provide a list of characters to help us keep track of who’s who.

Maximum: 30

Instructor Bio: Toby Zinman, retired Professor of English at the University of the Arts was awarded their prize for “Distinguished Teaching.” She has published widely and lectured internationally on American theatre. She has won five grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, spent a semester as a Fulbright professor at Tel Aviv University, and spent another semester as a visiting lecturer in China. A former theatre critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, she currently writes for phindie.com about the arts in New York and Philadelphia. She has written for the London Times and the New York Times, Variety and American Theatre magazine, and was named by that magazine “one of the twelve most influential critics in the U.S.” Her third career, as a widely published travel writer, has taken her all over the world, with adventures like dogsledding in the Yukon, walking coast-to-coast across England, and rounding up cattle on horseback in the Australian Outback.

Notes

Why when I’m registering do I join the Wait List?
Several of our courses are in high demand. In order to accommodate our members who are not tech-savvy and have trouble registering online, we created a registration system in which there is no advantage to registering early, no disadvantage to registering later.

When registering, you join the Wait List for each course. Don’t be alarmed. This does not mean the course is full. After the registration period is over, we run a lottery on the courses, and it randomly determines who is admitted to each course and who is not. You typically will receive notification regarding which courses you are admitted to, about two weeks before the start of the semester. If a course accepts 50 or more students, you are very likely to get into it.