This course will explore the interplay of drama and tedium in day-to-day life. All of the works we will read eschew a purely heroic or marvelous mode and instead focus on petty concerns or mundane experience. But these texts do so in a way that is far from ordinary or boring; each offers a distinct creative perspective on everyday life. Some of the works we’ll read highlight the intense and dramatic undercurrents of routine existence.

Describing, performing, and creating ecstatic experiences has been one of the great stumbling blocks in literature.  Whether it is a physical or a spiritual elevation beyond the norm, the ability to articulate the transcendent has challenged writers in terms of the forms that can be used to express the ecstatic; this obstacle has also, debatably, given rise to a huge release of creativity and the rise of new forms.  We will explore the very limits of human experience in theatre, fiction, scripture, opera, and lyric poetry.  Euripides describes what will be the ongoing tension between freedo

“To look at a thing is not the same as seeing a thing.” – Oscar Wilde

Contemporary debates about cultural matters often appeal to nature to decide them. Parties debating a cultural issue will attempt a familiar gesture: each will claim that its position is natural and therefore true. What relationship between society and nature does this appeal assume?  Why is nature seen as factually accurate or true?  Why would an appeal to nature decide a cultural issue?

Course Description: In The Republic, Plato condemps poetry for being too far removed from reality. A feeble imitation of the world (itself an imitation of ideal Ideas), poetry isn’t “true,” distorting human understanding of the world influence on young people to behave badly. In the Poetics, Aristotle argues that didactic, or scientific, verse isn’t really poetry. From the Greeks onwards, we have tended to distinguish poetry and science as different modes of thought with different relationships to truth or the real, and different functions in society.

Some texts have the ability to confound us. A hole in the plot, an unresolved ending, a word that feels wrong: these moments of ambiguity can frustrate our attempts to pin down what a text is really saying. But such riddles can also spark our curiosity and deepen our understanding of how literature works.

In this course we will consider madness in its many forms and characterizations in literature, film, and visual art.  Our study, however, will not be of madness itself so much as the way it exemplifies the close connection, for all of us, between what we see and the imaginative lens through which we see it.

This is a course about the pleasure particular to reading and reflecting on literary texts, especially those short narrative texts known as tales. It is about learning to become the kind of reader capable of being seduced by a literary text: by its language, plot, sheer inventiveness – even by its ambiguity. This course will also serve as an introduction to world literature.

According to the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, we live in “the best of all possible worlds.”  Whether or not that’s true, it hasn’t prevented us from ceaselessly imagining – or even creating – alternate realities: shiny fantasy worlds where our most cherished dreams come true or, when we’re feeling less optimistic, nightmarish dystopias where they are mercilessly crushed.  What constitutes a possible world or parallel universe?

What does it mean to meet someone or something we can’t name?  How do we know the difference between self and other, between friend and foe, between the familiar and the foreign?  What distinguishes a novel experience from an everyday event?  And how do we talk about what we’ve seen?  This course will turn to a variety of literary genres and visual representations as we interrogate the notion of the encounter.  We’ll track down visits to and from alien worlds, examine confrontations in the domestic sphere and in the street, and look at meetings with animals and with ghosts.