Classes

A chance to read from four rich periods: Anglo-Saxon literature (unrivaled in the Europe of its time for power and sophistication); Anglo-Norman writing (Tristan and Isolde); the late fourteenth-century (where Chaucer’s is not the only exceptionally rewarding oeuvre); and...

A permanent fault-line runs throughout Western literature, between epic and romance. Epic contests territory, while romance discovers the self. Epic focuses on charismatic leaders, represents the rise and fall of societies, and depicts war across a realistic geography...

Images find a very direct way into the depths of the psyche; they provoke both love and fear. Through literary texts, we examine the function of images from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, in both erotic and religious traditions.

Across the period 700-1700 the shapes of British culture were absorbed from different centers of Western Europe. These cultural forms are conflicted among themselves, and conflicted across time. This course will delineate theprincipal cultural forces (e.g. religious...

What is the function of literary texts in moments, from Plato to the Russian Revolution, that promise total, enlightened societal transformation? A hypothesis: literary texts do not participate easily in the new order. Literary texts are more divided in their sympathies...

A permanent fault-line runs throughout Western literature, between epic and romance. Epic contests territory, while romance discovers the self. Epic focuses on charismatic leaders, represents the rise and fall of societies, and depicts war across a realistic geography...

Across the period 700-1700 the shapes of British culture were absorbed from different centers of Western Europe. These cultural forms are conflicted among themselves, and conflicted across time. This course will delineate the principal cultural forces (e.g. religious...

Across the period 700-1700 the shapes of British culture were absorbed from different centers of Western Europe. These cultural forms are conflicted among themselves, and conflicted across time. This course will delineate the principal cultural forces (e.g. religious...

What is the function of literary texts in moments, from Plato to the Russian Revolution, that promise total, enlightened societal transformation? Each week, this course will focus on two texts related to selected “revolutionary” moments, one philosophical and one literary...