Literature Classes in NYC, New York

Madwomen, ghosts, witches, monsters—the gothic genre has long been a vehicle for representing female characters deemed too transgressive for inclusion in “respectable” fiction. Indeed, much of what makes the gothic dark and mysterious, what inspires dread, is how it reckons with thwarted female autonomy, repressed desire, and past injustice....

What does it mean to be human in the world today? Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) is a provocative treatise on what it means to live on earth and share the world in common. Her study, originally intended to be titled Amor Mundi (Love of the World), investigates the central activities of human life—labor, work, action—and their corresponding...

American Populism: History, Democracy, and Agrarian Revolt In recent decades, populism in the U.S. has most visibly been a right-wing phenomenon—from Pat Buchanan to the Tea Party to Trump—often overlapping politically with plutocracy and white nationalism. However, the largest populist movement in American history, the People’s Party of...

Join James Shapiro, the Larry Miller Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, for a seminar on Shakespeare’s long narrative poems: “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece,” both of which he composed during a plague outbreak in June 1592, when the theatres were closed for nearly six months, and “A Lover’s...

The arrival of Jacques Derrida’s work lit the American intellectual landscape ablaze. For many American academics and critics in the 1970s and thereafter, the charismatic Algerian-born Derrida was the face of “French Theory,” and virtually synonymous with postmodernism itself. With his enigmatic prose and seemingly esoteric approach to language,...

From the start, Western philosophy, literature, and medicine have been preoccupied—and haunted—with the figure of the mad and the idea of madness. What lies at the root of seemingly strange irruptions of emotion, speech, and erratic behavior? Do they arise by happenstance, or are they symptoms of disturbances in the body, the mind, the psyche,...

Culture, Feeling, and Capital: An Introduction to Raymond Williams Activist, critic, and key figure in the development of cultural studies, Raymond Williams was among the most influential radical intellectuals of the 20th century. The concepts and approaches he developed or helped to popularize—“structures of feeling,” “cultural materialism,”...

State, Power, and Democratic Socialism: an Introduction to Nicos Poulantzas “One thing is certain, socialism will be democratic or it will not be at all.” So wrote the Greek Marxist and theoretician Nicos Poulantzas, just a year before his untimely death. Poulantzas’s work, newly rediscovered by sections of the U.S. left, constitutes a highly...

Memoirists write their personal stories in a way that appeals to the emotions and experiences of their readers. Jewish memoirists Esther Amini, Angela Himsel, and Ilan Stavans will sit down with author Marcia Butler to talk about how they use the memoir format to express their identity and history.

The world is not usually imagined for the benefit of women. What can feminist science fiction tell us about these oppressive arrangements and how the world might be otherwise? What makes a work of science fiction feminist? From utopia to dystopia, satire to space opera, in what ways does science fiction hold up a mirror to difficult realties?...

In writing The Idiot,a novel dear to his own heart, Dostoevsky set about to depict a truly good man. As he asks whether goodness can survive in the world and/or a novel, Dostoevsky also addresses traditional assumptions about marriage, family life, the “woman question,” Russian identity, health, sickness, love and death. To celebrate the 150th...

The infamous witch-hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries were, as Silvia Federici puts it, “one of the most monstrous attacks on the body perpetrated in the modern era.” Persecuted as witches, and murdered in the tens of thousands, were heretics, healers, slaves, disobedient wives, and women who dared to live alone. For Federici, the Marxist-feminist...

Join charismatic actor and teacher Leo Schaff as he breathes life into Shakespeare’s words, acting out portions of the play and offering illuminating insights into the Bard’s language, plot lines, historical context and eternal relevance, all with a generous sense of humor. The Tempest - January 8 The magic hand of Prospero guides us through...

Join Colm Tóibín, celebrated author of Brooklyn and professor at Columbia University, for a course on three Irish writers and three American writers. The divided self and the delighted eye—this course explores the idea of internal tension in a text, literature in which there is an argument enfolding, an argument that animates the text; as well...

Enjoy the stunning work of these authors from around the world. Please read Natalia Ginzburg’s Happiness, as Such for the first class, Kobo Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes for the second, the first half of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook for the third, the second half of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook for the fourth, and Anna Burns’...