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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...

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...

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...

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...

How are we to understand loneliness today? It appears that we are facing a mass epidemic of loneliness—one perhaps exacerbated by virological pandemic of COVID-19. Britain has appointed a Minister of Loneliness to counter rising rates of isolation. Approximately 20-43 percent of American adults over the age of 60 experience “frequent or intense...

Dante’s Divine Comedy follows the journey of the poet through hell, purgatory, and paradise. This epic Italian poem, composed between 1308 and 1321, is an allegory for the movement of the soul toward God. But it is also a multifaceted exploration of ethics, metaphysics, politics, love, order, chaos, poetic form, and the Classical literary tradition. ...

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...

What is Deconstruction? The critical term, coined by Jacques Derrida, is notoriously hard to define. Derrida himself insisted  that “deconstruction” is not a method of reading, nor an analytical approach, nor even stable in its own meaning. And yet, deconstruction became the cri de coeur of literary theory in the United States: to its proponents,...

At age 37, Richard Wagner—composer, exile, and failed revolutionary—set to work on the project that would consume the next 25 years of his life. By its completion, it had grown into arguably the most ambitious artwork of the 19th century: the monumental cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, a fifteen-hour operatic tetralogy of unprecedented scope and...

What does it mean to be friends? What makes the deep affection found in friendship distinct from other intimacies, like marriage and kinship? How does this peculiar form of attachment give rise to ethics, to politics, to the good life—or not? In Homer, Achilles loved Patroclus as if he were his own life. Aristotle, echoing this sentiment in his...