Reading & Composition

In this course we will develop writing and argumentative skills through exploring theoretical and imaginative texts that revolve around technology, science and social order. We will read texts that take up the questions of artificial intelligence and human attachment (Ex-Machina), the relation between justice and techniques of scientific prediction (FoundationMinority Report), and time travel (The Time Machine) among others.

Reading & Composition

In this class, we’ll look at a number of works of dark comedy, past and present. Reading humor as a reaction to despair or anxiety, we’ll explore how each of these works use comedy to represent and critique real social and political issues.

Laughing to Tears: Dark Comedy in Literature and Film

“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that…Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world.”

—Samuel Beckett, Endgame

“What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?”

Reading & Composition

What gets preserved, lost, and changed in translation? What makes a translation “authentic” or legitimate? This course examines translations that travel across the boundaries of language, literature, and artistic genre. We read writers who translate their own work or take the problem of translation as the subject of their texts.

Reading & Composition

Daughters: we all either are one or know one. And yet, unlike those other familial categories—mother / father / son—the position and role of the daughter is fairly unexamined. In this class, we will read about many different daughters, dutiful—Shakespeare’s Miranda—and not—Sophocles’ Electra. While “daughter” is a relational name, and we will consider her status with regards to others, we will also attempt to consider the daughter herself, as an isolated concept and being.

Reading & Composition

Brandon Stanton has photographed over 5,000 random people on the streets of New York since 2010. His blog “Humans of New York” has 16 million Facebook followers, and his book by the same title spent 29 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list in 2015.  One of his most famous portraits – of a teenager named Vidal who witnessed a man being pushed to his death from the top of a public-housing tower – generated $1.4 million for Mott Hall Bridges Academy in Brooklyn.  But not everyone Stanton approaches willingly gives him a story.

Reading & Composition

In the opening pages of José Asunción Silva’s novel After-Dinner Conversation, the reader encounters a heated discussion between two of the work’s main characters, the poet José Fernández and his doctor friend Oscar Sáenz, about the former’s writer’s block. Oscar, the rational man of science, is quick to identify the source of José’s problem: his constant “prowl for new sensations.” In response, Fernández adamantly declares that all he desires is to “live life! To get drunk on it.” This course asks what it means to “get drunk on life” through the pursuit of sensual pleasure.

Reading & Composition

Monsters, demons, and other similar ghouls often serve as powerful metaphorical manifestations of social, political, or psychic tensions; as such, they play a key role in numerous literary, cinematic, and other artistic works.

Reading & Composition

Where once there was one, English now bears two.  Gender and genre come from Latin root gen, signifying “birth” and “race,” “kind” and “sort.”  Romance languages, however, tend to retain a single term: genregeneregénerogênero, the French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese tell us. What can we make of these words, whose very root seems to describe the birth of another kind?

Reading & Composition

From fairy tales to rom-coms, a story that ends in marriage – after many twists and turns, accidents and obstacles – is, by definition, a story with a happy ending.  In certain literary genres, marriage is so integral to narrative structure that “the marriage plot” is synonymous with plot itself.Marriage is sacred to those who live by their religions and offers unique fulfillment to those who find meaning in the secular realm. Its dynamic allows two people to find a life that could not be found alone, for a marriage becomes greater than just the two persons.

Reading & Composition

This class aims to reconsider our assumptions about the family home. Contemporary popular culture celebrates the home as a refuge from the world, finding in its separation from public life and association with the nuclear family the promise of a nurturing, comfortable space where we can simply be ourselves. Yet literature and film are replete with another sort of home: isolated but never totally private, familiar but never completely safe.

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