This course will explore the fates of four of Shakespeare’s most famous tragic couples as we read Romeo and Juliet (1594), Troilus and Cressida (1601), Othello (1604), and Antony and Cleopatra (1606). Instructor suggests the Folger Library editions published by Simon and Schuster.
Beowulf, considered one of the most important works of Old English literature, is an epic poem where the hero travels great distances to prove his strength at impossible odds against supernatural demons and beasts. There are feasts, challenges, deeds of valor and a retelling of the history of the characters and their lineages.
Mythology is our earliest form of literary expression and the foundation of all history and morality. This course will explore the mythologies of the world, contrasting their differences and also their commonalities. The text by Willis and Walker divides the mythologies of the world into regions and zones, providing background for discussion.
As a white woman writing against racial segregation and race-based violence from her home in the north Georgia mountains in the 1940s, Lillian Smith (1897-1966) was far ahead of her time.
How did the Cold War era change the eerie inner landscape of the intelligence agent in our fiction? Has the spy become just one more variation on the antihero? How does he or she navigate times of greater moral ambiguity and cynicism?
So much of literature explores the effects of American history, life, and violence on Black men and boys. It is a tradition that has been taken up by not just Black writers, but white ones as well.
Modeled on a course taught by James Alan McPherson at the Iowa Writers Workshop, this class will look at works of modern literature through one specific lens: love. In his Nobel Prize Banquet Speech, William Faulkner claimed that the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.
In 1921, Edith Wharton was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Literature. Her nearly forty-year writing career spanned not only decades but also written genres, as she wrote everything from interior design manuals to first-hand accounts from the front in World War I.
When the character of the confident American, who believes himself at home everywhere, travels to the Old World, what he or she experiences reaches beyond the easy pleasures of museum and cafe. Over six weeks, we will explore the depiction of the American abroad in novels by Mark Twain, Henry James, F.
In light of recent national and international developments, anti-fascism is indeed a timely theme. To gain insight we will explore three brilliant, if chilling, works. Although the focus will be on the literature, some time will be devoted to identifying possible analogies and dis-analogies to today’s world.