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What does it mean to be human in the world today? Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) is a provocative treatise on what it means to live on earth and share the world in common. Her study, originally intended to be titled Amor Mundi (Love of the World), investigates the central activities of human life—labor, work, action—and their corresponding...

“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...

This workshop teaches the tools to appreciate literary works and learn from accomplished writers from around the world. Students learn to interpret fiction, recognize underlying themes, decipher writing techniques, and analyze the human content of each story. Through readings, writing exercises, and class discussions, we examine works by such diverse...

In this class, students learn the rules of literary appreciation and study a range of classical and modern literary works by great writers. Students will learn the different methods of literary analysis with its five elements (story - characters - style - plot - human content) and they will practice critical reading comparing different texts...This...

Complete Course Title: A Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing: an Introduction to Marx In the mid-nineteenth century, a young Karl Marx wrote, in the form of a published open letter to Arnold Ruge: “But if the designing of the future and the proclamation of ready-made solutions for all time is not our affair, then we realize all the more clearly...

Homer’s Odyssey tells the tale of a mortal who suffers and who comes to know the “cities and minds” of humans. The travels and ordeals of Odysseus, as he moves from the ruins of Troy to the new civic possibilities of Ithaca, elaborate two constitutive myths: the first is the tale of the hero’s homecoming—the nostos, or “mindful return”—in...

Anthropology is at once a contested and vital field of study and inquiry. Still hotly debated is a basic question: what is the scope of anthropological inquiry? Modern anthropologists no longer divide the world, as their 19th-century forebears did, into a sociological “West” and an anthropological “rest of the world,” its “backwardness”...

How do we live with sacred text when it contradicts with our values of egalitarianism and inclusivity? In this queer-affirming class, we will explore historical and contemporary texts that respond to exclusionary and troubling texts. No previous text study necessary, all are welcome.

The Spanish Civil War is without a doubt the most dramatic and transcendental episode in the history of Spain during the twentieth century. And as a prelude to World War II, it also had deep international repercussions. Likewise, from the beginning this armed conflict left an impact in the artistic community, as we can see reflected in such works...

The archetypal novel of high modernism, James Joyce’s Ulysses attempts to synthesize the life of a city, the afterlives of previous literary styles, and the entirety of the Western canon as it stood in the early twentieth century. Since its original publication when it was serialized in the Little Review from March 1918 to March...

James Shapiro leads participants through the pair of plays that the Public Theater will stage this summer at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. This series of classes will offer insights into the language, style and performance histories of the plays, with the goal of preparing theatergoers to get the most out of seeing these productions. June...

Born into the apex of Gilded Age New York, Edith Wharton subverted the conventions of upper-class womanhood to fashion herself into one New York society’s most subtle and skillful chroniclers—and critics. Beyond her fine eye for interiors and social manners, Wharton was also, in Edmund Wilson’s words, a “passionate social prophet,” employing...

Love, Literature, and Destruction: an Introduction to Marguerite Duras Novelist, playwright, and experimental filmmaker, Marguerite Duras resists easy categorization. Despite endless attempts by critics and scholars to claim her for emerging genres and movements, it may be easier to say what she was not: she was not part of the nouveau roman...