Life, Literature and Art House

Do you love cultural exhibits? Do you want to connect the literature you read to live experiences? The members of the Life, Literature and Art House will do just that and more. This program will use literature as the foundational spring board to examine the world from many different points of view.

 Some house programs will include:

·        Spinning class (mind-body connection)

·        Museum excursions

·        Visits and lectures by art and literature specialists

·        Ballet performance

·        Musical performances

·        Conversational dinners

If you’d love to explore the space in which life and art intersect, apply to be a part of the first year of the Life, Literature and Art House.

About the Class—IDST 299/397: Life, Literature and Art

In his A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life, Arnold Weinstein emphasizes an education “not about facts and data.” Instead, he suggests literature and art as a way to see our world “though lenses not our own.” The students in this course will examine the critical questions of life through the lenses of art and literature. 

The voyage is visceral and experiential; it entails vicarious immersion in others’ lives, endowing us with new eyes and ears, perhaps changing our hearts. Such transactions are, of course, exciting, but their true rationale has a more ethical and existential cast to it: to bring us closer to the world’s heartbeat, to bring to—and into—something of the world’s great theater, even to function like a lightning rod, so that the great energies and forces that have coursed through history might, via art [and literature], strike us, jolt us with their vibrancy and intensity [p. xxi].

We will, for example, explore the sense of injustice—and hope—through W. H. Auden’s September 1, 1939; the longing for (lost) youth as depicted by Jacob Jordaens in his The Feast of the Bean King; and the penetrating power of love in Small Steps. The course provides an impossibly rich opportunity to think clearly through writing and discussion.

About the Professor—Dr. Della Fenster                      

 Dr. Fenster is an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Richmond. She teaches across the mathematics curriculum as well as the University Core course for first-year students. 

Her research lies in the history of mathematics, particularly in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. She recently returned from her sabbatical as a Senior Research Fellow at the Erwin Schrödinger Institute for Mathematics and Physics in Vienna, Austria, where she continued her work on a biography of the American mathematician Leonard Dickson. She also co-created a travel course to Vienna that ran in spring 2007 and will run again in spring 2008. 

Dr. Fenster is the recipient of the 2003 University of Richmond Distinguished Educator Award and the 2004 State Council of Higher Education for Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award. Day-to-day, she tries to strike a careful balance between dark chocolate and exercise.