This course will consider how Kafka’s writing opens up the question of how to know and follow the law, Our readings will consider the relation between law, justice, and redemption, engaging Walter Benjamin’s reading of Kafka’s work. We will focus on the short writings, including aphorisms, fragments, parables and short stories. How are philosophical and religious questions posed in and through the form of a literary work,? And what difference does that make? Conversely, what does Kafka’s writing imply about the importance of fiction to philosophical inquiry?

The onset of modernization in Greek society, after the War of Independence from the Ottoman Empire, albeit a belated one, brought about an increased contact with, and an imitation of, different European cultures. It also brought about an accelerated movement toward secularization.

The literary and artistic avant-garde of the early twentieth century was the most radical expression of European modernism in literature and art. We will be focusing on the four most forceful and creative of the literary movements to have swept through Europe between the 1910’s and the 1930’s: Italian and Russian futurism, dada in Zurich and Paris, Soviet constructivism, and French surrealism. We will be reading (and sometimes performing!) avant-garde poetry, literary manifestos, short performance texts, experimental fiction and memoirs.

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 class we will take a close and multi-faceted look at books written primarily for children, a category of literature that remains rather under-examined, despite its popularity, persistence, and influence. We will read examples of stories for children written in a number of different times (from the 18th to the 21st centuries) and places (Europe, Britain, North America), and our readings will make use of many different kinds of literary analysis: historical contextualization, analyses that draw on particular literary theories, psychoanalytical approaches, and close readings.

Comp. Lit. 100 is designed to present students with texts from various genres and historicial periods, to introduce them to the methods of comparative study.  The thematic focus of this course will be crises of patrilinearity—family romances gone sour.

This course is designed to introduce you to the most exciting literary and cultural moment in twentieth century America: modernism, the Jazz Age, the emergence of big city culture, the rise of a political left. This is the time of migrations from the South to the North, of exile and off-shore displacements through which American artists and writers stretched the boundaries of their local towns to open a world conversation about art and, never on the side, about race and gender.

Why do people write long novels, and why do people read them? We will look for answers in three different places: in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, and in selections from Marcel Proust’s seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time. Eliot and Dostoevsky had different ambitions as novelists. Middlemarch and The Idiot were written around the same time, but they come from different traditions (English and Russian) and have astonishingly different aims.

Session D:  July 3rd-August 11th.

Who are America’s heroes? Are they caped crusaders and cowboys, or are they of a more ordinary sort – oddball schoolmasters like Ichabod Crane and country lawyers like Atticus Finch? In this class, we’ll explore the question of American (both Northern and Southern) heroism by asking whether, how, and why America looked (or perhaps needed?) to create heroes that were different from the chivalric knights and epic warriors – including the Vikings that reached America – of the Old World(s).

Session D:  July 3rd-August 11th.

“I’ve seen justice for all genders and classes and sexualities, and it was as alien to me as the extra-terrestrial creatures who practiced it. This image of justice sprang from my own imagination, taking place on another planet, in another time, for a species of people very unlike humans. It took science fiction for me to see a clear picture of what justice could be. And at the end of the day, that’s all it was – fiction.” — Maisha Johnson