Many of the literary texts we study today come to us incomplete. Perhaps the author passed away before the work was finished, or perhaps we know the text only through scraps of parchment used in the binding of a different manuscript. Still other texts consciously position themselves as fragments, even if this move is but an artifice on the part of the author.

Our fascination with flight has led to literary representations of heroic feats and tragic transformations. In this course, we will look at humans levitating, devising prosthetic machines, and turning into birds in a wide range of canonical and popular texts. We will consider how these characters are lauded and condemned by other characters as well as the language used to bestow these evaluative claims. We will look at how flight is used as a plot device and how it shifts narrative perspective.

What makes a good conversation? In everyday life, we tend to think of a successful conversation as one that navigates around moments of tension: a primary if implicit aim of most conversations is to avoid conflict, misunderstanding, and awkwardness. This course, by contrast, will explore the possibilities offered by conversations that don’t go so smoothly. In readings from Plato and Shakespeare to Aimé Césaire and Hannah Arendt, we will consider how adversarial conversations might allow modes of understanding and forms of community that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. 

The frontiers of the Roman Empire, dragon-infested England after the death of King Arthur, the Reconquista Wars between Christians and Moors, and conquistadors in New World America – perhaps these sound like settings you would encounter in a trans-historical survey of world literature, but they’re in fact worlds you will find within the pages of novels written just decades ago.  

“The following work was found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England. It was printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529. How much sooner it was written does not appear.”

This is a course in beginning Modern Greek, involving speaking, reading and writing.

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 grammatical and linguistic foundation in Greek as it is spoken today.  In this course, there is also an emphasis and practice of oral language skills.