Instructor: Nikola Fialka*
Our newest instructor, Nikola Fialka, a BC-based novelist, who writes under a pseudonym, will be restarting a key part of Los Altos programming that has been on hold due to personnel changes. It is our hope that, with the resumption of our speculative fiction courses, our speculative fiction reading group will also be back up and running soon. This course follows a key shift in Old Growth Left culture with the admission to the discourse on sex and gender of woman-centred optics and analyses that are not a school of feminist thought.
Format and Cost
The course, comprising thirteen sixty to ninety-minute classes, has a total cost of $150 US (an increase from $150 Canadian, at which registration costs were frozen 2020-24). Individual classes can also be purchased at $12.50 each.
Texts
Students will focus on the three novels canvassed in the syllabus. The instructor will facilitate their affordable acquisition.
Course Schedule
A meeting time will be mutually set by the instructor and students after course registrations are received. If you register but the course is at a time of day that does not work for you, your registration fee will be refunded in full.
| Date | Title | Subject |
| February 26th, 2025 | The Motherless Daughter – early biography and alter ego | An exploration of each author’s early years to see how they came to publicly inhabit, through their work, the archetypes of both waif and artist. Particular focus will be given to autobiographical pieces and how they describe relationships with their mothers. |
| March 3rd, 2025 | The Wolf and the Lamb – The Male Artist as Muse | Each artist had a powerful male figure in their life that both nurtured and stifled them in their most formative years. Examining the archetype of the narcissistic male artist as competitor, lover, and destroyer in each of their lives. |
| March 5th, 2025 | Narcissa and the Nymphs – the waif as female artist | Each artist has a particular style of both portraying and embodying the archetype of the waif and how it relates to that of the artist. When seen through the lens of the period in which they lived and consequently the particularly gendered artistic struggles they faced, this takes on new meanings in our modern era. |
| March 10th, 2025 | Dystopian Surrealisms – surrealism and the dystopian impulse | This class focuses on the phenomenon of surrealist art and its preoccupations at the time the authors lived and worked. It attempts to contextualise the surrealist aspects of their work and explore, from a literary perspective, the dystopian elements. |
| March 12th, 2025 | Heroin, Absinthe, A Nice Fur Coat: Addiction and the Sublime | Each woman had a particular relationship to varying styles of addiction, from sartorial preoccupations to heroin. The role these addictions played in their own lives, their work, and that of their lovers will be examined. |
| March 17th, 2025 | Paris, London, Down Below – the Psychogeography of Three Urban Landscapes | Urban landscape plays a pivotal, visceral role in the lives and books of each woman. This class tales a look at this through the lens of psychogeography, the radical exploration of everyday urban places and processes derived from the practices of the French Situationists. |
| March 19th, 2025 | Female, femme, feminist fatale: three phases of historical development | In this class, feminism and its particular effect or lack of effect on each artist is approached through specific explanations of where feminism in each woman’s particular space and time then defined itself. |
| March 24th, 2025 | Sex and Symbology | Sexuality and the complications of each author’s relationship to sex and the body is explored in this class. Prevailing ideas and controversies surrounding female sexuality in the realm of psychology at the time the books were written will also be discussed. |
| March 26th, 2025 | Other Worlds – Ice, Hell, and Down Below: nature and the female gaze | Along with the urban landscape, the artists each had particularly significant relationships with nature and wildness. From a feminist perspective the connection of the female subject to nature, and its disruptions is indicative of the relationship to one’s own body and consciousness. These lines are sometimes blurred completely in the artist’s work. For Rhys, hell is other people, for Kavan, hell is climate catastrophe, and for Carrington, a literal place in her own mind. |
| March 31st, 2025 | Theatre for Free – the feminine as theatrical installation | Each artist and their characters embark on a particularly female and socially stratified journey of learning to display themselves, judge themselves and adorn themselves in terms defined by class and space. This time the physical is defined not by relationship with the body but by the social gaze. |
| April 2nd, 2025 | The Devouring Photographer – anorexic imperatives in Rhys, Carrington, and Kavan | The disappearing woman in literature in often defined expressly by what she consumes and tries not to consume, both in terms of food and other things. This illuminates in turn what she what she is consumed by in a capitalistic society. This is examined in each woman’s work, both in terms of literal and metaphorical acts of anorexia. |
| April 7th, 2025 | Three Muses – examining modern imaginings of female madness | Madness as described and reimagined in the works of the three woman will be discussed, along with relevant modern presentations of female madness in popular culture and how these representations find their roots or oppositions in the artist’s works. |
| April 9th, 2025 | Wide Sargasso Sea: Rhys, Carrington and Kavan in advanced age | Each artist had a particularly eccentric, opulent approach to advancing age, and navigated their social obligations and innovations in vastly different ways. The legacy of each artist is finally examined. |
