Hanford Woods and Eric Karpeles

What Is Art? Reading Shakespeare and Tolstoy

Join Michael Lerner in conversation with Shakespearean professor Hanford Woods and artist Eric Karpeles about Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Tolstoy’s What Is Art.

Familiarity with both works of art is optional but recommended.

Listen (audio only)

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Hanford Woods

Hanford teaches Shakespeare at Dawson College in Montreal and is a longtime Bolinas resident.

Eric Karpeles

Commonweal Board Member Eric Karpeles is a painter and writer. Born and raised in New York, he has also lived in India and in France, settling in Bolinas in 2007. His painting career has been shaped by the quest for a spiritual presence in art, and by a negative response to the elitism of the contemporary marketplace. The Rockefeller Chapel is a room-sized painting he completed in 1996, a permanent installation at the HealthCare Chaplaincy in New York City. Karpeles writes about painting and the intersection of literature and visual aesthetics; his book, Paintings in Proust, translated into several languages, was a “book of the year” in the NY Times, the Times of London, and The Wall Street Journal.