Literature Classes in NYC, New York

Join Jamie Warren for an Olio dedicated to analyzing and discussing Michel Foucault’s much-celebrated essay, “What is an Author?” We will learn about Foucault’s concept, “the author function” and its chilling role in the production of ideology and power. At one point in history, the writer acted as a menace, her words possessing tangible...

Work through selected chapters of Ulysses and discovery what makes the novel resonate today, with Michael Groden, editor of the James Joyce Archive

Forgiveness and the Unforgivable: Religion, Literature, Philosophy What constitutes an apology? Are certain kinds of acts unforgivable—and, if so, why? Who, indeed, has the power to forgive? In this course, we’ll set these questions in historical context, beginning with Bishop Joseph Butler’s eighteenth-century sermons, then exploring discussions...

From Hegel to Deleuze, many political thinkers have employed the language of dominance and submission within the tradition of Western political thought. How does the language of Sado-masochism shape the way we think about desire and political recognition? This course will look at how the erotic language of S&M is embedded in the theoretical frameworks...

Join charismatic actor and teacher Leo Schaff as he breathes life into Shakespeare’s words, acting out portions of the play and offering illuminating insights into the Bard’s language, plot lines, historical context and eternal relevance, all with a generous sense of humor. The Tempest - January 8 The magic hand of Prospero guides us through...

“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...

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...

Composed sometime between the seventh and eighth centuries B.C., Homer's Odyssey is one of the oldest works of world literature and the ancestor of virtually every narrative that involves a difficult journey home. The longing to return home is for Odysseus is the longing of a man to recover his identity as a king, husband, and father after having...

Memoirists write their personal stories in a way that appeals to the emotions and experiences of their readers. Jewish memoirists Esther Amini, Angela Himsel, and Ilan Stavans will sit down with author Marcia Butler to talk about how they use the memoir format to express their identity and history.

What makes Dante’s Divine Comedy such essential reading today, even though it was written seven centuries ago? This course will explore the fascinating world of Dante’s epic poem in all its cultural and historical richness, as we consider Dante’s relation to his beloved hometown of Florence, his lacerating experience of exile, and his...

Elizabeth Bishop is a modern North American poet who is hard to identify in terms of a single school of poetry, place, or home. She writes poems linked to her native ground of Nova Scotia and Massachusetts, yet she is also a poet who famously writes of travel. Brazil, where she lived for twenty years, was home away from home for her, as was Key West,...

Join author Stephanie Rabinowitz for an exciting exploration of relatively unsung American literary gems that you should be reading. From Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop to John Williams’s Stoner, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, and Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, Rabinowitz will focus on...

Resting on the fault line between art and politics, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man makes the powerful claim that black modernism and the African-American experience are central to the American narrative. For Ellison, the plight of his narrator, “both black and American,” was emblematic of major and  persisting paradoxes in American...

Jacques Lacan always insisted that he was a thoroughgoing Freudian—perhaps the most orthodox Freudian of them all. A larger-than-life provocateur, Lacan’s oracular lectures and clinical innovations (including the notorious “short session”) ultimately led to his excommunication from the International Psychoanalytic Association. Yet, despite...

Architect Steve Bass presents a view of the proportional idea based in the ancient philosophical systems of Pythagoras, Plato and later Neo-Platonists.  In this view number and geometry, the substance of proportion, are endowed with qualitative, harmonic, life-like properties.  These ideas are then linked to numerical and geometrical methods...