Literature Courses

An exploration of the dynamics of contemporary China using the tools of close reading, discussion, and analysis.

Embark on a global journey to explore the past, present, and future of world literature.

Examine how great modern writers capture the intricacies of our globalized world and how their works circulate within that world to find their own audiences.

Examine how cultures of the ancient world defined themselves through literature and how their vision of literature contributes to our understanding of civilization, culture, and literature today.

Explore Chinese history and culture from the perspective of the individual through philosophical texts, literary works, and art.

An exploration of the magnetic and ambivalent character of Shylock in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.

An exploration of the haunting figure at the heart of one of William Shakespeare’s most famous plays.

Explore acts of storytelling in Shakespeare’s Othello alongside world-class artists who interpret Othello’s story in new forms and contexts today.

Learn how to read William Shakespeare's plays through his biography, Elizabethan and Jacobean history, and modern performance.

This course introduces the earliest English literature, starting with basic grammar and building up to selections from various prose texts and poems such as The Wanderer and The Dream of the Rood.

James Joyce's Ulysses is the most admired novel of the twentieth century in English. In this course, we try to see why that is true by reading the book closely, chapter by chapter.

This course introduces students to the main topics of Irish folklore study. Our main goal is to assemble a rich and detailed picture of life in rural, traditional Irish communities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The focus of our analysis is the novel's response to three kinds of breakdown: aesthetic decadence, imperial decline, and aristocratic degeneration.

In this course, we take a broad view of Saunders' life and work, asking ourselves what his writing can teach us about voice, prose style, and the state of contemporary American literature more broadly.

This course examines the Sikh scripture from a doctrinal and historical perspective by providing an overview of Sikh teachings as well as the historical context within which the scripture evolved and became canonized.