Planning Ahead: "Now for Something Completely Different"

Yes, Iceland was just as cold as it looks!

I am just back home this week from a wonderful 10-day adventure in Iceland - and am ready to give some attention to a new lecture series.  

If you have been attending any of my classes over the years, then you are accustomed to my focusing on history with contemporary social, political and even religious implications.  Those series can get to be a bit heavy–like my recent Rise and Fall of the Not-So-Invisible Empire on America’s history of White supremacy, racism and the Ku Klux Klan. That series was a great event.  Lots of information.  But it certainly was intense.  So, I am taking a break from "heavy" and planning to do something a little more fun.

I have proposed an online lecture series in the SCU-East Bay OLLI program for the fall that takes me back to my academic roots in psychology and my interest in literature and culture. 

Enchantments:  The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales

Little Red Riding Hood by Jessie Willcox Smith
(1911) from the book A Child's Book of Stories

Contemporary Americans have simultaneously watered down fairy tales with Disney cuteness and eschewed them as stories too frightening for young children. But fairy tales did not originate as stories for children. They were stories told by adults for adults, the chief form of wintertime entertainment in pre-literate agricultural communities.

Those who study myths, dreams and the symbolic nature of human psychology believe that the telling—and hearing— of stories like fairy tales is not a passive experience, that there is a powerful dynamic that takes place in the telling and listening to stories. Some cultures even trained their physicians in the art of storytelling so that they could use stories as tools for psychic and emotional healing and to help a patient become a more integrated person. (Scheherazade's storytelling in One Thousand and One Nights is not simply a ploy to save her life; her storytelling is therapeutic.)

My Plans for the Series

I presented this series several years ago and am now updating it.  My plan is to look at the nature and history of fairy tales and the theories of psychological interpretation—with a presentation on the basics of Freudian and Jungian. psychology.  We will explore both some well-known and lesser-known fairy tales to see what they can tell us about ourselves and our journey towards integration, wholeness, and healthy human development.  

Hope to see you in the fall!  I'll keep you posted on scheduling.  In the meanwhile, check out the great selection of OLLI lectures available during the Spring/Summer 2024 Term!

[My related posts:  Fairy Tale Damsels in Distress and Enchantments and Villains]

Registration is Open: The Rise and Fall of the Not-So-Invisible Empire

Registration is now open for my next online lecture series in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at California State University-East Bay:  The Rise and Fall of the Not-So-Invisible Empire.  

You can register on the OLLI website by clicking here.   Hope to see you there!  In the meanwhile, check out a few of my recommended readings in a previous post.   [Of course, I'll have created a lengthy bibliography by the time the series starts as usual.]  

You might also find the PBS American Experience page Reconstruction: The Second Civil War worth checking out.

On a misty April evening in 1865, a jubilant crowd packed the White House lawn to hear President Abraham Lincoln first speech since the end of the Civil War. They expected a stirring celebration of the Union victory — but instead got harsh reality. Even with the South defeated, Lincoln warned, the future would be "fraught with great difficulty." He called the task ahead reconstruction — a word that returned to American headlines nearly a century and a half later, in the aftermath of the war in Iraq.

Even as Lincoln spoke, opposing forces were gathering. Some Americans saw Reconstruction as a chance to build a new nation out of the ashes of war and slavery. Others vowed to wage a new war to protect their way of life, and a racial order they believed ordained by God. Lincoln saw the problem with agonizing clarity. Bitter enemies, North and South, had to be reconciled. And four million former slaves had to be brought into the life of a nation that had ignored them for centuries. In some ways, it was harder than winning the war.

Three days after delivering his warning, Lincoln was shot dead. Reconstruction would have to go forward without him.

Spanning the momentous years from 1863 to 1877, Reconstruction tracks the extraordinary stories of ordinary Americans — Southern and Northern, white and black — as they struggle to shape new lives for themselves in a world turned upside down.

Reconstruction:  The Second Civil War

American Experience 

Aired January 12, 2004