The Great Con: The Talented Mr. Ripley In Literature And Film

The Great Con: The Talented Mr. Ripley In Literature And Film

Osher Online | Registration closed 9/13/2024

U of A Fayetteville, AR 72701 United States
Online Through Zoom
Open to Current OLLI Members ONLY!
Friday, October 11, 2024-Friday, November 15, 2024
10:00 AM-11:30 AM on Fri
$65.00

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The Great Con: The Talented Mr. Ripley In Literature And Film

Osher Online | Registration closed 9/13/2024

American writer Patricia Highsmith first published The Talented Mr. Ripley in 1955. The story is told from the point of view of Tom Ripley, a man who is young, clever, and has a knack for fraud. A case of mistaken identity earns him a ticket abroad to a scenic coastal village in Italy, a far cry from his hardscrabble life in New York City. He soon becomes obsessed with Dickie Greenleaf, heir to a shipbuilding fortune, and embarks on a series of deceitful and sinister acts that beget more of the same. Highsmith’s story builds its suspense as the reader traverses Tom’s physical and psychological journey through an affluent world too obtuse to recognize the extent to which he is a threat.

The Talented Mr. Ripley has been adapted from book to screen multiple times, with the most notable being the 1999 film directed by Anthony Minghella, starring Matt Damon and Jude Law. Such is the influence of the story that it has invited comparison to the 2023 film Saltburn, whose main character commits a similar subterfuge on a wealthy British family over the course of a summer in their country castle. As stories of frauds and scammers endure across popular media, Tom Ripley’s is one that confronts the reader to examine how far they would go to gain access into a world whose entry requires reinventing oneself to the point of moral collapse.

In this course, we will study the Highsmith novel as well as the 1999 film adaptation. We will close out the course with a discussion of Saltburn, which is indebted to the novel.

(Current OLLI Members Only)

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    Class schedule: Live lectures will take place on Fridays, 10/11/24-11/15/24 (6) from 10:00 am - 11:30 am via ZOOM 

    • Live Lecture 1  Friday, 10/11/24
    • Live Lecture 2  Friday, 10/18/24
    • Live Lecture 3  Friday, 10/25/24 
    • Live Lecture 4  Friday, 11/1/24  
    • Live Lecture 5  Friday, 11/8/24
    • Live Lecture 6  Friday, 11/15/24
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    As this class is delivered by the National Resource Center for OLLIs (NRC) at Northwestern University, you will receive a welcome email from osheronline@northwestern.edu.  The email will include your credentials (username & password) as well as a hyperlink to the Osher Online Website through which you will access your course website.

     

     

Brown, Ph.D., Heather
Heather Brown, Ph.D.

Dr. Heather Brown has a PhD in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition from the University of Maryland, College Park, a Master of Arts in English from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, and a Bachelor of Arts in English with a Concentration in Creative Writing
from Hollins University, in Roanoke, Virginia. She’s been designing and teaching undergraduate and graduate courses since 2004, including those in academic writing, English literature, language and linguistics, women’s literature, feminist theory and criticism, and rhetorical theory and criticism. In 2013, Dr. Brown transitioned from teaching courses face-to-face to hybrid and online delivery. She liked it so much that she wanted to learn how to design for eLearning, so she began working as a Learning Designer primarily serving graduate and professional studies programs in not-for-profit higher education institutions and library training organizations, and most recently the Northwestern University School of Professional Studies Office of Distance Learning.

Since 2013, Dr. Brown has been an Adjunct Associate Professor of Academic Writing at the University of Maryland Global Campus, one of the largest distance-learning institutions in the world, where over a third of the students are Black and African-American and the University serves more than 55,000 military-affiliated students worldwide. Prior to that, she was an Assistant Professor of English at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey from 2010-2013, where she served as the Associate Director of Academic Writing and Co-Director of the Gender Studies Program.