English
Baseball: the American Narrative
English
Baseball: the American Narrative
A. Bartlett Giamatti, former president of Yale and commissioner of Major League Baseball, believed that this game is “the plot of the story of our national life.” In this course we will look at how baseball reflects, embodies and illuminates...
Utopias & Dystopias in Literature
English
Utopias & Dystopias in Literature
Fantastic societies have held a fascination for writers from Thomas More to the present day. Utopia, “no place,” represents an idealized society whose inhabitants willingly embrace its difference from our own world. Dystopic visions are the...
Writing the Body
English
Writing the Body
“I’ve only ever wanted to write about what it feels like to be alive, and it turns out being alive is always about being in a body. We’re never not in bodies: That’s just our fate and our assignment.” (Leslie Jamison, “Why...
The Jewish Literary Imagination
English
The Jewish Literary Imagination
Primo Levi’s short story, “Quaestio de Centauris,” describes a centaur living in exile from others like him in the human world. In her discussion of this story for a series in the New Yorker, Jhumpa Lahiri describes Levi’s time in...
Fictions of Finance
English
Fictions of Finance
What do we value? The pursuit of profit, surges in wealth and the suspect principles of the financier have intrigued authors since the 19th century. How do language, narrative style, structure and literary production transform with shifts in the marketplace?...
Gothic Literature and Horror
English
Gothic Literature and Horror
Haunted houses. Vampires. Ghosts. Monsters and the monstrous. Things that scare us and make us question reality are the most notable aspects of Gothic literature and horror. This course will trace the development of Gothic literature from its earliest...
The Harlem Renaissance
English
The Harlem Renaissance
Harlem, New York. 1920s. A constellation of African American writers, artists, performers and thinkers are changing American and world culture, pollinating African American art and literature. Between WWI and the Great Depression, Harlem was distinctly in...
Theater of War
English
Theater of War
Representation matters. Representation on the page and on the stage – paired with power — have material consequences. This course examines representations of race and religion in the context of war and empire in classical, early modern and...
Page to Screen: Film Adaptations
English
Page to Screen: Film Adaptations
Students read novels, short stories, essays and plays and study their transformation into films. Through these comparisons and a short study of key film techniques and perspectives such as auteur theory, students learn how to “read” a film. The...
Shakespeare Now
English
Shakespeare Now
Poet Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare that he “was not of his age, but for all time.” But what does a poet playwright, dead now some 400 years, have to say that speaks to this moment of the human experience? In this class we will read and discuss...