Writing just before and just after the second world war, Margaret Mitchell and Simone de Beauvoir depicted two types of feminism in two types of text. De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) combines...
Short shorts, flash fiction, fables, parables, prose poems – literary gems that invite re-reading, re-thinking, re-imagining. All strange and unsettling enough to be called “Kafkaesque.” Along with a...
Unlike the film/play, the original novel Les Misérables is a sophisticated work that combines history, philosophy, and literature, crossing genres in a way that is true of perhaps only Tolstoy’s War...
This course is a close engagement with a handful of Woolf’s most beloved and impressive long fiction works: Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and Between the Acts.
Course...
In the follow up to her classic A Room of One's Own, Woolf's "Three Guineas" offers an ahead-of-its-time account of the impact of ideals of masculinity on society, by way of pondering how women might...
In this follow up to her classic A Room of One's Own, Woolf's "Three Guineas" offers an ahead-of-its-time account of the impact of ideals of masculinity on society, by way of pondering how women might...
A giant of modernist English poetry, Stevens grappled deeply and protractedly in both his poetry and prose with the particular character and problems of what he called 'modern reality'. We will read...
There’s a tension running through the Western tradition—and the Basic Program four-year curriculum—about what to do with the ancient Greek idea of political freedom. Dust off your Herodotus, Plato...
Well... ghosts. But what else? How do the presence of ghosts inflect the stories we tell about ourselves? This course approaches such questions through a close reading of classics in the ghost story...
T. S. Eliot described The Moonstone as “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels.” The novel established many of the conventions of detective fiction. The moonstone of...