Explore the captivating world of literature in the heart of NYC with a range of classes covering diverse genres, from classic literature and poetry to modern fiction and creative writing, where participants can enhance their understanding and appreciation for the written word.
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Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY
Ovid begins his Metamorphoses, “My soul would speak of bodies changed into new forms,” and it is the great theme of physical transformation that unites the poem’s many myths: humans becomes animals and plants, and vice versa; humans becomes stones and constellations; and humans change their sex. No poem from antiquity has so influenced Western European literature and art. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dante creatively raided Ovid’s...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY
“The postmodern,” writes Marxist literary and cultural theorist Fredric Jameson, “is the force field in which very different kinds of cultural impulses . . . must make their way.” Adapted from a New Left Review essay of the same name, Jameson’s Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism is an ambitious account of how the postmodern has replaced modernism as the “cultural dominant” of late capitalism. In conversation with...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY
Uncover the transformative power of poststructuralist, feminist, and psychoanalytic methods in art criticism through an exploration of the writings and ideas of Rosalind Krauss, the influential founder of October journal. Analyze representative artworks alongside her essays, as you delve into the ways in which art objects and movements challenge categorization and reshape aesthetic experience. Discover how Krauss's unique theoretical vocabulary redefines the role of the critic in art historical narratives.
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Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY
Explore the enduring relevance of utopian thinking through the work of Ernst Bloch in this thought-provoking course. Delve into his vision of a non-alienated future and examine how art and literature can inspire political transformation. Join us as we challenge the proliferation of dystopian imaginaries and embrace the power of hope, imagination, and anticipation.
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 314 7th St, Brooklyn, NY
Uncover the untold history of Reconstruction in America through W.E.B. Du Bois' groundbreaking perspective. Explore the struggles and triumphs of Black people during this transformative period and discover the lasting impact on U.S. democracy today. Supplementary readings by renowned scholars add depth to this thought-provoking course.
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 411 S 5th St, Brooklyn, NY
Uncover the intersection of literature, politics, and culture in a thought-provoking course that examines the themes of fear, power, and influence in contemporary fiction.
92nd Street Y @ 1395 Lexington Ave, New York, NY
Join James Shapiro, the Larry Miller Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, for a seminar on Shakespeare’s long narrative poems: “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece,” both of which he composed during a plague outbreak in June 1592, when the theatres were closed for nearly six months, and “A Lover’s Complaint.” Professor Shapiro recommends the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Shakespeare’s...
92nd Street Y @ 1395 Lexington Ave, New York, NY
Experience the creative genius of some of the nation’s most gifted authors, both past and present. Please read Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena for the first class, Edna Ferber’s So Big for the second, James Alan McPherson’s Elbow Room for the third, Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women for the fourth, and William Faulkner’s The Reivers for the final session. Please read each work before the corresponding session....
92nd Street Y @ 1395 Lexington Ave, New York, NY
Delve into some of the best short novels of the 20th century. Spend the first weeks of summer delving into some of the best short novels.
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
A novel of cruelty, poisoned love, ruthless necessity, intergenerational vendettas, memory and revenge, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights remains an opulent enigma. First published under the male pseudonym, Ellis Bell, the book puzzled and repulsed its initial readers, who castigated it for immorality but reluctantly acknowledged its inscrutable power. In a preface to the novel, Charlotte Brontë attempted to vindicate her sister by arguing...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
In this course we look closely at Gandhi’s South Africa years—a time of both racial warfare, and great love and friendship—to understand the source of the philosophies and practices that would later inspire many currents of the civil rights movement in the United States. While many analyses of Gandhi and his thought focus on ideas and influences from Braminical and Jain sources, this course will focus on the South African moment and this archive...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
Marxism and Culture: Georg Lukacs, Revolution, and Consciousness “Materialist dialectic is a revolutionary dialectic.” So wrote the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács in March 1919 as a participant in the proletarian revolutions sweeping Europe in the wake of World War I. In a series of essays written in response to the Bolshevik Revolution, Lukács re-conceptualized orthodox Marxism in Hegelian terms, at once restoring dialectical materialism...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
Virginia Woolf called George Eliot’s Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” Henry James described it as “at once one of the strongest and one of the weakest of English novels… a treasure-house of details [and] an indifferent whole.” In our own time, Middlemarch is widely considered the finest Victorian novel, and is the subject of popular books as well as endless scholarly conversation. Who was George...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species produced a radical paradigm shift in thinking about the living world. After Darwin, the origins of life were no longer miraculous or murky: life could build itself, meaning humanity no longer stood apart from the natural world or required a supernatural character. This work remains, for some, controversial, but it is a key tenet of all contemporary biological inquiry. Over the course...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
“April is the cruelest month,” writes T.S. Eliot in the opening lines of The Waste Land (1922), “breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire.” What does modern poetry remember, and what does modern poetry want? This course, an introduction to the exhilarating, maddening, and strange experiments of twentieth-century poetry, explores how poets responded to the astonishing social, political, aesthetic, and technological...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 230 5th Ave, Brooklyn, NY
What is poetry and what is it good for? These questions have long haunted practitioners and readers of this “beautiful and pointless” art, to quote the contemporary critic David Orr. But “beautiful and pointless” were not always the terms of the debate. On the contrary, these questions about what poetry is and what it does mean something profoundly different in our contemporary moment than they meant in centuries past. Nor is this sense of...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
The biblical story of the Flood permeates the popular imagination. The plot is certainly familiar— an entire world submerged in water, pairs of animals marching onto the ark, eventual redemption—but our ability to realize the power of this story is often hampered by assumptions about its history or its primitive character. Yet, far from a single localized myth, the story of the flood is central to a range of ancient cultures—from Mesopotamia...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
State, Power, and Democratic Socialism: an Introduction to Nicos Poulantzas “One thing is certain, socialism will be democratic or it will not be at all.” So wrote the Greek Marxist and theoretician Nicos Poulantzas, just a year before his untimely death. Poulantzas’s work, newly rediscovered by sections of the U.S. left, constitutes a highly original set of writings on the nature of political power in both liberal-democratic and authoritarian...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
American Populism: History, Democracy, and Agrarian Revolt In recent decades, populism in the U.S. has most visibly been a right-wing phenomenon—from Pat Buchanan to the Tea Party to Trump—often overlapping politically with plutocracy and white nationalism. However, the largest populist movement in American history, the People’s Party of the 1890s, arose on the left, and is arguably one of the most radically democratic political formations...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
Culture, Feeling, and Capital: An Introduction to Raymond Williams Activist, critic, and key figure in the development of cultural studies, Raymond Williams was among the most influential radical intellectuals of the 20th century. The concepts and approaches he developed or helped to popularize—“structures of feeling,” “cultural materialism,” “keywords,” “dominant, residual, and emergent”—continue to shape new work in cultural...
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