Event Series:
View All Programs In This Series
Reading Canetti: Auto-da-Fé and the Problem of Wisdom
- Pacific Time Virtual Program
$72.00
Course Summary for Search and Accessibility
This course, Reading Canetti: Auto-da-Fé and the Problem of Wisdom, is an Educational Program offered by New Lehrhaus. It is scheduled to begin on 8/13/2026 and conclude on 9/3/2026. The sessions are held weekly on Thursdays from 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm Pacific Time.
The total registration fee is $72.00. The course is conducted Online and focuses on the life and work of Elias Canetti, Auto-da-Fé (Die Blendung) and twentieth-century European Jewish literature, the German-Jewish modernist tradition of Kafka, Benjamin, and Canetti, Canetti's Sephardic heritage and the Ladino-speaking Jewish world of the Balkans, and the philosophical novel and the problem of wisdom.
Auto-da-Fé (Die Blendung, 1935), his only novel, is the great early statement of that inquiry, a book about learning that produces no wisdom, about systems of understanding that function as elaborate forms of not-seeing, and about the dazzle (Blendung) by which even the most disciplined mind blinds itself. Its very English title, the act of faith of the Spanish Inquisition, carries the Sephardic memory that shadowed Canetti's life and work.
We will read the novel together [over the summer], led by Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Tulane University and author of A Different Order of Difficulty: Literature after Wittgenstein, whose current book in progress, The Vanities of Wisdom, takes up the questions that animate this book.
Who this is for
- Readers drawn to the major works of European modernism and philosophical novels.
- Anyone interested in East/Central European Jewish writing and the catastrophes that shaped it.
- Those curious about how literature thinks about wisdom and the limits of understanding.
What you'll leave with
- A careful encounter with one of the most uncompromising Jewish minds in twentieth-century European writing.
- A sense of Canetti's distinctive method and his place alongside Kafka, Benjamin, and the other German-Jewish writers of his generation.
- An introduction to Canetti's lifelong inquiry that he pursues throughout all his work, where the questions of the novel open out into a major body of thought.
Four Thursdays: August 13, 20, 27, and September 3, 12–1 p.m.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Zoom link/details will be emailed to you once you complete registration, one week before your program AND the day before. Please keep this information in a location easy to find.
How many people would you like to register for this program?
| Canetti: Auto-da-Fé | $72.00 100 available | |
| Members get exclusive pricing for this program! Sign in to see your discount. | ||
| Continue | ||
