Cormac McCarthy has finally given us two new novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris. We will read them together and consider the proposition "[t]hat at the core of reality lies a deep and eternal...
Together these five “little scrolls,” which is the meaning of Megilloth, recount parts of the story of ancient Israel. Set in the time of settling in the land of Canaan, the book of Ruth narrates how...
“. . . all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea . ..” says Melville in Moby-Dick, and, in a letter, “I love all men who dive. Any fish...
We will take the methods of close-reading and Socratic questioning to the sands of Egyptian desert to explore the rich traditions of monasticism at its origin. Beginning in the third century, men and...
In Part III of The Man Without Qualities, titled "Into the Millennium," or "The Criminals," Ulrich finds a soulmate and worthy interlocutor – his own sister, Agathe. The siblings embark on a pursuit...
In this first of a two-part course, we read Homer's Iliad expansively as an oral epic in its full context of literature, myth, and history. We will also read closely and compare at least two...
The Gay Science is not just one Nietzsche’s most beautiful and accessible works, it is also one of his most important, setting forth as it does virtually all the major themes of his mature philosophy...
The formula "beyond good and evil" is not, for Nietzsche, an invitation to immoralism but an injunction to reassess what it means to be moral - and therefore also what it means to be human - in light...
Eliot’s novels are always deeply probing, socially and psychologically insightful and nuanced, and beautifully written. In this class we will undertsake a close reading of two of her most powerful...
Both filled with wild adventures, The Thousand and One Nights and The Golden Ass are two of the earliest and most influential picaresque novels ever written. Apulieus’ Roman novel The Golden Ass (2nd...