CS Lewis Portal (List View)

What is love? This is the question C.S. Lewis explored in his classic book, The Four Loves. Over four weeks, we will read and discuss The Four Loves as a class, exploring his four classifications and their philosophical underpinnings. Comparing and contrasting Lewis with short excerpts from Plato's Symposium and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, we will explore the themes of affection, friendship, eros and charity. [show less]

C.S. Lewis is one of the most prolific and influential writers of the 20th century. And yet, in his early career as an Oxford don, he viewed himself as a failed poet. Moreover, his most canonical and transformational writing happened during the most stress-filled periods of his life. This short course allows students to peek into the writing life of C.S. Lewis. Our goal is to see through the lines of printed text by visiting the letters and archival remains of Lewis in a virtual setting. Most of C.S. Lewis's papers remain undigitized and unpublished, available only locally at archives in North America and England. As Professor Brenton Dickieson has visited these archives, he is able to invite students to appreciate C.S. Lewis's writing life by looking at the way that he consciously and unconsciously built his literary career. This course is for writers who are developing their own habits and literary life-prints, as well as folks who are curious about C.S. Lewis's life beyond the biographies and bestselling books. We are not doing text close readings, but looking at the “paratextual” information available to us: writing drafts, letters, diary entries, manuscripts and typescripts, title, and the like. Week 1: Lewis: Pen, Ink, Paper • C.S. Lewis’s Single-jointed Self-Conception as a Writer • What Lewis Says about his Writing Habits • Legendary Bonfires, Stuffed Dolls, and American Suckers: A Story of Lewis’s Papers and Manuscripts • The Screwtape MS. Story: Part 1 Week 2: Leaves, Bombs, Stains • The Screwtape MS. Story: Part 2 • “Villainous Handwriting”: Charlie Starr’s Lewis Handwriting and Rough Draft vs. Fair Draft • Reconsidering the Lindskoog Affair with Manuscript Evidence of “The Dark Tower” Week 3: Joy, Theft, Death • “The Quest of Bleheris”: Lewis’s Teenage Novel Week 4: • Is it True that Lewis Wrote in a Single Draft? • A Grief Observed • Tumbling Through the Wardrobe: The Discovery of Narnia • Arthurian Torso • A New Sketch of Lewis’s Writing Process(es) Note: This course includes a significant amount of visual material on the screen. Please contact the SPACE team if you have visual accessibility requirements and we will do everything we can to accommodate. [show less]

“It is no use trying to account for things in Fairy Land; and one who travels there soon learns to forget the idea of doing so…” Let us wander into George MacDonald’s dreamlike Phantastes, the first fantasy novel for adults! Having just come of age, Anados wakes to find himself swept into the fairy realm. Wandering through its sun-dappled woods, he is hunted by his own sinister shadow. Compelled to face malevolent trees, questing knights and living statues, Anados will come face-to-face with his own mortality, emerging forever changed… Rich with lyrical prose and fantastic imagery, Phantastes takes you on a journey like no other, which will stay with you far beyond its end. [show less]

“Seeing is not believing—it is only seeing.” The first modern novels to take place entirely in an imaginary world, George MacDonald’s fantasies were formative in the imaginations of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. In this module, we’ll read MacDonald's children’s novels, as well as his essay, "The Fantastic Imagination." Eight-year-old Princess Irene is forbidden from exploring her father’s castle. Little does she suspect that hordes of goblins dwell beneath her feet, scheming to overrun the kingdom. Soon, a chance encounter with heroic miner (and occasional poet) Curdie sweeps Irene into an adventure of which she never dreamed. Enter a world where legends rise from a labyrinth under the earth and immortal grandmothers bestow magic rings from above, where rhymes drive back monsters and belief reveals the path home. [show less]

What did the creators of Middle-earth, Narnia, a philosophy of consciousness, and spiritual shockers have in common? Answer: they were all part of a group called The Inklings who met in Oxford between the 1930s and 60s to discuss their ideas and work. We will spend a week on each of the four main members of The Inklings, discussing samples of their work and the ways their imaginations and ideas overlapped. By the end of the course, we will understand how this group of writers influenced each other and helped create the genre of fantasy literature. [show less]