This course is intended to address some of the more persistent and daunting difficulties we face when beginning to read classic texts of the Western cultural tradition.
We will begin from...
James Joyce's collection of short stories, Dubliners, and his semi-autobiographical first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, will serve us as an introduction to a three-quarter treatment...
In Ulysses, James Joyce composed arguably the modernist novel par excellence. In the course of telling a story, Joyce explores not only the lives of his characters, but also story-telling itself. The...
John Donne—great metaphysical poet, learned lawyer, and distinguished Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral—was a man of crashing intellect and passion. From the seduction, bravado, and humor of poems like...
This course will look at John Henry Newman’s four magisterial works and selections from others. Newman’s corpus contains the most profound 19th c. treatment of enduring religious, philosophical, and...
In this class we will do a close reading of the essential writings of 19th century British philosopher and parliamentarian John Stuart Mill, including "On Liberty," "Utilitarianism," and "On the...
In this final course in a three-quarter sequence, students continue their exploration of Journey to the West, one of the Four Classic Novels of Chinese literature, published in sixteenth-century Ming...
An in-depth discussion of "The Judgment" (1912), "A Country Doctor" (1917) and "A Hunger Artist" (1922).
To marry or not to marry? It might appear that this is the question of Søren Kierkegaard’s seminal work, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life (1843) – a two-volume paradoxical love letter meant to explain...
The historian Livy chronicled the ancient Roman Republic (in 142 books) from his viewpoint at the beginning of the Empire. This class focuses on a turning point in Roman history - the War with...