Literature Classes in Online

Greek myth stands at the origin of “Western” thought about the nature of the cosmos, the divine, the heroic, and the human. The myths, so familiar to the modern reader yet so uncanny, present a cosmological order that answers to the deepest questions of human experience: What is the origin of everything—of the universe, the gods, and humans?...

Flannery O’Connor: Literature, Violence, and the American Gothic Over the course of her brief but prolific career, Flannery O’Connor carved out a sui generis place in American letters. An heir to the flowering of Southern literature after Faulkner in its most gothic form, O’Connor also took conscious aim at liberal intellectuals in...

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...

Bringing a novel to life is a lengthy process of commitment. Students will learn the process of planning, moving the narrative forward, developing memorable characters, describing scenes, introducing elements of conflict and tension, and the techniques of novel writing. They will hone their writing style and perfect their literary voice, through rewriting,...

In this ten-week course, students read novels and learn to see and analyze the techniques, structure, and rhythm of long-form literary works, an essential skill in crafting compelling fiction of their own. This in-depth Reading Fiction class is for writers as well as avid readers. Through readings and class discussions, we examine works by such celebrated...

This online workshop in Arabic 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...

The Black Jacobins: Liberation, Political Theory, and the Haitian Revolution The Haitian Revolution marked not only the liberation of Haiti from French colonial rule, but also, in Cedric Robinson’s words, “the first slave society to achieve the permanent destruction of the slave system.” As with the Paris Commune later in the 19th century and...

Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) may be the best known scholar of Jewish Studies in the twentieth century. Above all he is associated with launching the modern academic study of Jewish mysticism. However, Scholem’s study of mysticism was only part of his much broader, far more engaged and systematic thinking about questions of contemporary politics...

Is there a distinction between art and life? Can art express the passions that we repress in life? Can our imaginations bypass the control of reason? Does art contain revolutionary potential? These are some of the questions we’ll be exploring in Introduction to Surrealism. Born as a literary movement in the wake of the horrors of World War I, surrealism...