A towering achievement of 20th-century European literature, Sleepwalkers (1932) explores the struggle of the individual in times of changing values.
The Death of Virgil (1945), by prominent Austrian modernist Hermann Broch, is an imaginative and delightfully challenging story about the last day of the Roman poet's life. Often described as a...
Herodotus is the great storyteller of the ancient world and also perhaps the first multiculturalist. His stated goal is to write so that “great and wonderful deeds would not go unsung.” He recounts...
2023 marks the seventieth anniversary of the publication of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March. How well has it aged? While not his greatest novel (by consensus that title belongs to Herzog)...
An emperor makes history. A proofreader invents it. Who has more freedom? Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian (1951) and Jose Saramago’s The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989) pose old...
This course is a special extended edition of the Basic Program methods course offered as part of our celebration of the 75th Anniversary of the program. One of the foundational premises of the Basic...
Like its counterpart How to Read Classic Texts, this course aims to help students improve their reading skills as they approach reading religious texts as literature.
This course is meant to prepare us for a delightfully challenging two-quarter adventure – diving into David Foster Wallace’s gigantic Infinite Jest (1996). We’ll discuss Wallace’s seminal works...
We continue our immersion in David Foster Wallace’s mega-novel Infinite Jest (1996). New students who have read the first half of the novel (up to p. 538) are welcome to join the course.
Asked if he was proud of his Infinite Jest (1986), David Foster Wallace said, “Yes. No line was unconsidered, no fact was unresearched.” This means everything is meaningful in the novel’s epic...