English
Literature and the Land
English
Literature and the Land
In this course, students will participate in outdoor excursions that prompt them to contemplate their relationship to the natural world. Drawing on an array of classical and contemporary environmental writers, including Edward Abbey, Gretchen Legler, Henry...
Shakespeare in Stratford
English
Shakespeare in Stratford
This course is the centerpiece of the Stratford Program. Students attend performances of the plays produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in Stratford-Upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace. The reading list is designed around the offerings of the...
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
English
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...