Ori Soltes Lecture Series, Spring 2022: Watership Down

The Age of Adventure and Exploration

A virtual lecture and Q&A from Professor Ori Soltes focusing on Richard Adams's Watership Down.

To join this virtual lecture and Q&A, please do not register directly from this website. Instead, please email my.nguyen@dc.gov for the link.

Please see library staff for assistance with the reading materials, which are available upon request.

All gatherings are from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. While the branch is currently closed for in-person discussions, we continue to meet virtually. Please email my.nguyen@dc.gov for additional details.

Overview
The West End Library Friends Present: Ori Z Soltes: The Age of Adventure and Exploration

By definition, adventure and exploration pushes beyond the edge of what we know into the unknown—they can stay fairly close to everyday reality or transcend it, carrying the adventurer-explorer and his or her follower-reader into a phantasmagorical realm beyond our everyday expectations.

The title of the theme plays on the word “age”: any and every age can be an age of adventure and exploration. It’s just that the particularities of what and how a character explores and shapes adventures both can change. And at what age do we, as a species, most particularly explore and have adventures? If for some of us we may reach that point in our lives and then pass it, for others it can begin as soon as we can crawl and never end until our lives end.

Our series starts and ends in an American context—although that context has in fact become internationalized in the last work In between , our series follows in diverse cultural and conceptual directions.

As usual, each session will be preceded by ten question to think about, available about a week before we convene.

Books to be Discussed
February 16: The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
March 16: Watership Down by Richard Adams (1972)
April 13: The Sword of Summer by Rick Riordan (2015)
May 11: Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin (2019)
June 8: The Martian by Andy Weir (2011/2014)

About Ori Z. Soltes, PhD
Ori Z Soltes has spent a lifetime wrestling with questions that resonate through the history of the human experience. His dynamic teaching, lecturing, curating and writing reflect a broad series of interests and a unique ability to combine them in unusual ways that are thought-provoking and both challenging and intellectually exciting.
 
He currently teaches theology, philosophy and art history at Georgetown University. He has also taught across diverse disciplines for many years at The Johns Hopkins University, Cleveland State University, Case Western Reserve University, Siegel College in Cleveland, and other colleges and universities.
 
Dr. Soltes has lectured at dozens of museums across the country, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

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