- Total price
€175.00
5 sessions
- Schedule
Every Tuesday
Nov 3 – Dec 8
- Time
18:00–19:30
- Class size
Min 6 · Max 10
Margaret Atwood: “There's a Hemingway story in which a young man is having a campout with his girlfriend, and she realizes that things aren't the same, and she says, 'What's wrong?' and he says, 'It's not fun anymore.' So I think there are points in your life — for everybody's life — when they think, 'It's not fun anymore.' It's a pretty crushing thing to say.”
Rachel Martin, NPR: “I guess, but like, I don't know. Ernest Hemingway I don't want to hold up as my romantic role model.”
Margaret Atwood: “It's not a question of romantic role model: it's a question of good story writer. And no matter what you may think of Hemingway's private life, which I know too much about, In Our Time is one of the game-changing story collections of the 20th century. He was a nightmare as a husband and romantic partner, but that's . . . a different thing.”
I'm glad I took Atwood's suggestion, and I'm excited about this opportunity to work through the rich layers of these deceptively simple tales as a group. First published 101 years ago, by an author whom I now describe as “Portrait of the Artist as a Very Different Young Man,” the stories of In Our Time still move with the weight, heft, and athleticism of an Olympian.
The early twenty-something Hemingway who wrote the stories published as In Our Time introduced modernist techniques never before seen in the American short story. He employs them in the service of speaking the unspeakable: the First World War and its traumatic aftermath, both on the men (mostly) who served and the women (mostly) and family and friends to whom they returned.
Hemingway's questioning of traditional narrative techniques is of a piece with his questioning of what it meant to be alive in the post-WWI, early-20th-century United States.
November 3, pp. 3–26: Indian Camp, The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife, The End of Something
November 10, pp. 27–78: The Three-Day Blow, The Battler, A Very Short Story, Soldier's Home, The Revolutionist
November 17, pp. 79–104: Mr. and Mrs. Elliot, A Cat in the Rain, Out of Season
* We will not meet Tues. November 24*
December 1, pp. 105–132: Cross-Country Snow, My Old Man
December 8, pp. 133–163: Big Two-Hearted River: Parts I & II
About Nancy Goldstein
Nancy taught literature at Harvard and MIT before leaving academia for Wall Street, then Brooklyn for Barcelona. She holds a PhD in English Literature with a focus on the Victorian era, and first caught the bug in poetry courses with Helen Vendler, the noted Harvard critic.
She leads literary discussion groups in London for adult readers, guiding close, peer-level conversation rather than lecturing at them. Recent participants have called her “a superlative leader” and her teaching “not only great — it was a gift.”
She's lived in L’Eixample since 2022 and sings in the 240-person Barcelona English Choir — its only woman bass.