On Thursday, March 28, 2024, we will meet to discuss The Quiet American by Graham Greene. We will meet at 7:00 p.m. via the Google Meet link which was provided in the email invitation.
From npr.org:
“An American comes into a foreign place full of ideas of democracy and how he will teach an ancient culture a better — in fact, an American — way of doing things. An Englishman awaits him there, protecting himself against such foolishness by claiming to care about nothing at all. And between them shimmers a young local woman who seems ready to listen to either suitor, and certain to get the better of both.
The Quiet American, by Graham Greene, was written in 1955 and set in Vietnam, then the site of a rising local insurgency against French colonial rule. In its brilliant braiding together of a political and a romantic tangle, its characters serve as emblems of the American, European and Asian way, and yet ache and tremble as ordinary human beings do. It also is a typically Greenian prophecy of what would happen 10 years later when U.S. troops would arrive, determined to teach a rich and complex place the latest theories of Harvard Square. Lyrical, enchanted descriptions of rice paddies, languorous opium dens and even slightly sinister Buddhist political groups are a lantered backdrop to a tale of irony and betrayal.“
The Quiet American is available at local libraries and available online from Internet Archive.
Information for the 2024 Great Books Symposium;
The 2024 Great Books Symposium will be held at the College of DuPage on April 24th from 1 – 3 PM. The text being used by the students is the Robert Fagels translation of Oedipus the King (Rex) by Sophocles.
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