Spring 2025, CairoShort Course
Beauty Will Save the World
Course details
- Cycle
- Spring 2025, Cairo
- Starts
- Tuesday, Feb 11
- Meets
- Tuesday, 18:00–20:30
- Length
- 6 sessions
- Format
- In person
- Taught in
- English
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About the course
How can beauty save the world? This six week interactive discussion class may unleash the possibility of such transformation. Beauty can change perception, inspiring respect, and surprising responses to difficult situations. Sometimes beauty is dangerous. As we enter into 'beauty' we'll be as imaginative as we are analytical, guided by the wisdom of a variety of writers, thinkers, and activists, such as: Solzhenitsyn, Simone Weil, Dostoyevsky, John Keats, Aristophanes, William Blake, Langston Hughes, and Native American Elders. You're encouraged to bring examples of Egyptian and/or Arabic beauty to each class, enhancing luminous discussion, and informing your final project. Our class culminates in a 'Beauty Salon' wherein you'll each present an imaginative scenario -a story, a poem, artwork, a video, a plan - in which beauty alters and transforms a person, a community, a place, a country, or the whole world. Beauty is at the heart of Utopian thinking that's needed now.
Who teaches it
Has taught humanities — literature, religion and performance — in China, Russia, Sweden, the USA and the UK (at Oxford, where she received her doctorate). Published over twenty articles and the book Blake’s Jerusalem As Visionary Theatre; also a peace researcher, actress and social worker who created arts programmes for Chicago teenagers who had been homeless and abused.
From the fellow When Solzhenitsyn and Dostoyevsky survived gulags they both affirmed: 'Beauty will save the World.' How can this be? 'Beauty' (as a word) has being, and it's related to other dynamic nouns, like 'truth,' 'forgiveness,' 'imagination,' 'peace.' As we enter into 'beauty' we'll be as imaginative as we are analytical. You'll each be asked to present a creative response to our readings, and to bring in examples of Arabic poetry, stories, or ideas compatible with the texts we're discussing. And, you're enjoined to create a scenario in which beauty saves a world: this can be an essay, a story, a poem, a video, a puppet show, a piece of art. Utopian thinking can have practical ramifications.
Course flow
February 2025
How does this idea work? Where is beauty? What does it do?
How can beauty be truth?
- Nobel Address: Beauty Will Save the World?Solzhenitsyn.
- "The Russian Monk"Dostoyevsky. From Brothers Kamarazov.
- Ode on a Grecian UrnKeats.
How many people don't die?
How effective is erotic diplomacy?
- Book of JudithChapters 10-14.
- Book of EstherExcerpts.
- LysistrataAristophanes. A short scene.
Can beauty be a social structuring principle? What ecological benefits come from that? How is beauty both spiritual and material? Is beauty stronger than death?
- Braiding Sweetgrass (Iroquois Thanksgiving)Robin Wall Kimmerer. From.
- Navajo Night Chant
In class
- ExerciseStorytelling Workshop: The Iroquois League Foundation Story.
- ExerciseIn this session we'll chant, we'll sing, we'll embody the story. The power of beauty goes into hearts souls, body and mind.
March 2025
After reading Blake's words allowed we'll begin to imagine how all things interconnect, a web of beauty. Could aesthetics be more important than economics? Would that save the world?
- Songs of Innocence & of Experience5 poems.
- Auguries of Innocence
How does perception affect what we see? How do forgiveness and beauty interrelate? Why does Simone Weil think that humanity can be saved by aesthetics?
- Forms of the Implicit Love of GodSimone Weil.
- Thank You Ma'amLangston Hughes. A very short story.
- Between Heaven and EarthJames Hubbell. Video on art, architecture, sculpture.
We'll end with a mosaic of insights imagining how the beauties we cultivate can and will uphold truth and wisdom. How can your work have practical implications?
In class
- PresentationYou'll each present creative work, accompanied by a brief analysis of how your project relates to at least one of the texts we've considered.
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