In this course, we will read Salman Rushdie's modern classic, Midnight's Children.
Like Gunter Grass in The Tin Drum, in Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie creates a fantastic witness to major...
We read three Greek tragedies that feature the Iphigenia myth: Agamemnon by Aeschylus, and Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis and Iphigenia in Tauris. The myth of the House of Atreus, and the movie, The...
In this class, we read two texts by the Roman Historian Sallust that deal with the turbulent period in the late Republic that set the stage for the civil wars that ultimately resulted in the end of...
We read Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, Milton's Lycidas, and Bellow's "Seize the Day," which features the earlier works as part of the liberal education of the protagonist.
Through a careful reading and discussion of Shakespeare’s play, this course will explore Shakespeare’s exaltation of “graceful Christianity” in both the major and minor plot threads of one of...
In this course we’ll discuss the first tetralogy of English histories that Shakespeare wrote for the stage – Henry VI, Parts 1-3 and Richard III. This is called the “first” tetralogy because it was...
Shakespeare’s Henriad comprises four of his history plays. It portrays the forced deposal of Richard II by his cousin and successor, Henry IV, of Henry IV’s struggles to overcome a series of armed...
Baruch Spinoza was one of the most influential and controversial figures of the Enlightenment era. His groundbreaking work, Ethics, sought to correct logical inconsistencies in the writing of...
John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel depicts the odyssey of the Joad family, displaced by the Great Dust Bowl and forced to give up their home to become migrant farm workers. Steinbeck based the novel in part...
Steinbeck treats the life of the Salinas Valley, Monterey, and the Pacific, by drawing from geologic pre-history, the external and inner movements of people, the uses and abuses of those lands and...