All Program Dates
February 18, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
March 4, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
March 18, 2025 |6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
April 1, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
April 15, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Registration
Tuition for this course is $250. Members receive exclusive discounts on our programs and courses. Not a member? Learn more.
Please check your spam folder for your email confirmation. If you have questions, please call (215) 732-1600 or email rsvp@rosenbach.org..
A welcome email from the instructor three weeks before the course begins. Zoom links will be sent for the course one week before the first meeting.
All online courses are recorded and these recordings are available to watch up to thirty days after the entire course has ended.
This course is now sold out.
If you are still interested in joining the waitlist, please email rsvp@rosenbach.org.
New: Recording-Only Course Option
We like to keep our Rosenbach courses at a size small enough to facilitate discussion and to allow access for all students to our instructors. Because of these small class sizes, courses frequently sell out. However, we recognize that some students enjoy just watching the videos.
At a 50% discount of the registration fee, you would get access to the recordings of the course meetings. You will receive the links to the class recordings the day after the class meets and will be able to watch these recordings up to thirty days after the course ends.
To purchase a ticket to the recording-only version of the course, please click the button below.
Description
Percival Everett’s 2024 novel James is a retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved African American who accompanies Huck on his journey down the Mississippi River. For well over a hundred years now, Huck Finn has been a contender for the title of “Great American Novel.” Huck’s coming-of-age story told against the backdrop of the antebellum American South has resonated with young readers and literary critics alike. As far back as 1992, however, the Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison encouraged us to think more critically about Huck Finn and to approach it from a perspective that allows us to “release it from its clutch of sentimental nostrums about lighting out to the territory, river gods, and the fundamental innocence of Americanness.” Everett’s James takes up this 30-year-old challenge with a stunning novel that forces us to see Huck, Jim, and American culture in an entirely new light.
In this five-week online class, we will spend the first two weeks reading Huckleberry Finn. For our third meeting, we will explore the legacy of Huck and Jim in African American culture with a series of short readings from authors such as Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, and John Keene. We will spend the final two weeks reading Everett’s James.
Instructor
Edward Whitley is Professor and Chairperson of the English Department at Lehigh University, where he teaches courses in American literature and humanities approaches to data science. He is the author of American Bards: Walt Whitman and Other Unlikely Candidates for National Poet (University of North Carolina Press, 2010) and editor of the forthcoming Norton Library edition of Leaves of Grass. He is also editing the first critical edition of A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin with Christopher N. Phillips and Zachary McLeod Hutchins for Oxford University Press’s Collected Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe.