“As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language…”
— Joan Didion, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”
The Symposia
Symposia offered through the ICI run from one-day two-hour seminars to intensive weekend symposia to once-a-month year-long classes, and range in topics from short poems to 1,000 page novels and from works of epic poetry to contemporary cinema.
The Method
Together we seek to cultivate the art of reading as a way of engaging with great works of art, literature, and philosophy—whether that means learning how to become better readers of poems or paintings, novels or sculpture, an essay or a movie.
The Goal
Through contemplation, discussion, and shared inquiry, the ICI makes great works of culture, from The Epic of Gilgamesh to the poetry of Ishmael Reed, from Plato’s Dialogues to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, available to all who wish to engage and grapple with these monuments to human creativity.
The Institute for Creative Inquiry 