“I understand,” he said, “but what?”

-Rabelais

People today do not have enough poetry in their heads, and everyone should be able to recite one or two of their favorite poems. In addition to its purely personal benefits, knowing some poetry by heart has practical applications: in a tough job interview, you can impress the prospective boss by reciting just the right line, say, from Dylan Thomas: “do not go gentle into that good night/rage rage against the dying of the light.” Or at a party some time, you’ll be able to show off with a bit of T.S.

How similar should we expect the portrait of a slave in an ancient Roman comedy to be to the portrait of a household servant in a nineteeth-century British novel?  What parallels might we see between an ex-slave’s account of her own escape and a philosopher’s use of slavery as a metaphor for political powerlessness? What special features of slaves and servants might authors be drawn to when they make them narrators or use them to move the plot along?

This course will explore the history of the idea of human rights and the role of literature in depicting human rights abuses and in advancing human rights claims, with a particular focus on twentieth-century literature. How does literature contribute to the invention of the concept of human rights? How do the authors talk about human dignity? What issues do they identify as central in their discussions of social justice? What narrative strategies do the authors employ to represent violence without sensationalizing it or turning the reader into a voyeur?

“Well – what remains to be written after that?” wondered Virginia Woolf in a 1922 letter about Marcel Proust’s monumental seven-volume work, In Search of Lost Time. Chronicling everything from the strangeness of kissing to the casual cruelties of snobbery, Proust’s novel conducts a vast and searching inquiry into the nooks and crannies of human experience.

This course will examine the work of Greek intellectuals (philosophers and literary writers) who, as adults, in moments of Greek historical and political crises, left Greece and emigrated to other European countries. The primary corpus of the work of these authors was written in the languages of their adopted countries, thus, allowing them to make major contributions to the specific intellectual life of those countries and to European letters in general.

In this course we will study the intersection between Renaissance literature and the great journeys of exploration and conquest that shaped the birth of the modern world. We will read fictional works by such authors as Shakespeare, Cervantes, More, Montaigne, Camoens, and Rabelais, in dialogue with writings of the sailors, missionaries, cartographers, scoundrels, and traders who expanded the limits of the European imagination with their accounts of “unknown” territory.

Modern Greek is unique among languages in that it is the only modern language directly descended from Ancient Greek. In this course, the student studies reading, writing, pronunciation and use of contemporary spoken idiom, all within the historical and cultural context of the language. By the end of the course, the student should have a strong grammatical and linguistic foundation in Greek as it is spoken today. (No Prerequisite)

In this course we will consider a variety of written and cinematic texts, largely produced in the last decades of the twentieth century, all of which foreground the movement of individuals or communities across national borders.

This course will offer a comparative introduction to lyric poetry across different linguistic traditions (including poems originally composed in Chinese, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese and Spanish). While we may consider different definitions and origin stories of the lyric genre–as muted song, verbal picture, overheard speech, or emotive expression–our main focus will be on learning how to read and write about poetry in its shorter forms. You will be encouraged to read in the original when possible, but all readings will be provided in English.