Fadem’s Class to Explore Jewish Protaganist, Daniel Deronda

Richard Fadem will offer a literature class this fall focusing on the novel Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot. The class will meet on Thursdays, 10:00-12:30 at the Senior Center, from September 30th until November 18^th.  The Oxford World Classics edition, available at Darvill’s, will be used for the class.

Registration will begin after Labor Day at the Senior Center. The fee for this class is $25, payable by check to Ruthie Newman at the first class. As always, any surplus will be donated to the high school’s college scholarship or English program.

According to Richard Fadem: “George Eliot is a great English writer and in the 19th century second as a novelist only to Dickens. But as a novelist she is very nearly unique because she is first of all an intellectual who happens also to be a superb imaginative writer. Her thought as much as her imagination permeates her fiction.  She read widely in philosophy, history, and of course literature and she possessed a brilliant mind.

“Everything George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) has written is exceptional in its intelligence and understanding. Her mind is capacious and deep, philosophical, subtle, and humane, and she takes seriously the notion articulated by the Roman poet Horace that literature should both delight and instruct.

“Daniel Deronda is the first English novel by a major novelist that has a Jewish protagonist. The novel takes place during two years, 1864-66, a momentous time that includes the end of the American Civil War and, under Bismarck, Germany’s expansionism and demonstration of military and industrial strength. A united America to the west, a nationalistic Germany to the east are simultaneously rising powers that dominate England’s horizon and, the English understand, will threaten Great Britain’s dominion over palm and pine. Eliot takes for her protagonist an exotic, not entirely “English” figure, someone who incarnates a very old, wise world and yet exemplifies the new.

“Because the novel is rich in allusion to other writers, from the Hebrew Testament’s authors to Moses Maimonides, Dante, Milton, Goethe, Rousseau, Paley, Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, and Robert Browning, We’ll devote the eight weeks to Deronda, We’ll then have time for brief excursions into reading some of the works, especially poetry, to which she alludes.”