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Documentary Poetics
English
Documentary Poetics
Documentary poetry is the poetry of witness, of weaving together public and personal history to give voice to the silenced, a reckoning to the dead and disappeared, and to honor and celebrate human joy and struggle. It is a poetry that captures historical...
Jane Austen
English
Jane Austen
In this course, we will study Austen’s novels with a focus on her use of language to show the universal tension between raw desire – for money, power and love – and the restrictions placed on that desire by social conventions and internal...
James Baldwin
English
James Baldwin
If ever there was a time to celebrate Baldwin, it is now. “Only an artist can tell what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it,” he said. This course will explore Baldwin’s early life in Harlem, New York City, in the...
Samuel Beckett
English
Samuel Beckett
Nobel Prize-winning Irish author Samuel Beckett once said, “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.” And yet his words have proven central – necessary even – to the way many have come to experience and...
Looking for Zora
English
Looking for Zora
In this course, we will examine the life and work of Zora Neale Hurston, “A Genius of the South.” While she is best known for the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, she published more than 50 short stories, essays and plays. She was also an...
Kazuo Ishiguro
English
Kazuo Ishiguro
Topically, the fiction of Japanese-born British Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro is elusive, whether he is evoking the complexity and trauma of post-war Japan, improvising with Arthurian legend or flirting with dystopian science fiction. He’s a...
Cormac McCarthy
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Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy once wrote, “If it doesn’t concern life and death, it’s not interesting.” Not surprisingly, his novels abandon the domestic in favor of the epic. They explore the inevitability of conflict, the nature of evil and our...
Moby Dick
English
Moby Dick
Journey with Ishmael as he sails on a Nantucket whaling ship under the command of the despotic Captain Ahab on his mad hunt for the great white whale. Subversive, queer, philosophical, political and groundbreakingly experimental, Herman Melville’s great...
Toni Morrison
English
Toni Morrison
Throughout her decorated career, Toni Morrison celebrated the African American experience as a central and essential component of American history. At the time of her passing in 2019, she was recognized as one of the most important writers of the 20th...
Viet Thanh Nguyen
English
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Viet Thanh Nguyen argues that “all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” In a war smothered in lies, silence and misinformation, how does the writer of that war, misnamed the “Vietnam...