Literature Classes in NYC, New York

The language of love lends HER voice to seminal stories of Super Hero Femmes.  Learn French Brooklyn lead instructor Souad Bouhayat offers expert instruction and guidance to this impassioned subject matter. Each workshop follows a predetermined curriculum and study plan.  Book excerpts are read, dissected and discussed in an equally academic...

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. This year, he tackles the history plays. Sep 26 — Henry VI, Part I Part...

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Each session, students will address three of the twelve unnumbered chapters in the book and focus on issues that are raised by those chapters.   Topics covered will include: literary form, personal psychology, social status, rewritings of The Odyssey and Ulysses, local and imperial politics, archetypes and myths, distant and intimate marriages,...

Dante’s Divine Comedy follows the journey of the poet through hell, purgatory, and paradise. This epic Italian poem, composed between 1308 and 1321, is an allegory for the movement of the soul toward God. But it is also a multifaceted exploration of ethics, metaphysics, politics, love, order, chaos, poetic form, and the Classical literary tradition. ...

From smoky-eyed vamps to spunky PIs, the role of women in crime fiction has come a long way, baby! This course focuses on women crime fiction writers and female sleuths, with the occasional “guy” thrown in for comparison.  Book list will be provided before the first class.

A novel of cruelty, poisoned love, ruthless necessity, intergenerational vendettas, memory and revenge, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights remains an opulent enigma. First published under the male pseudonym, Ellis Bell, the book puzzled and repulsed its initial readers, who castigated it for immorality but reluctantly acknowledged its inscrutable...

Hold on to your number 2 pencils, we’re taking on the SATs. We've taken high school’s most stressful test, sprinkled some comedy on it, and turned it into a drinking game! Your favorite test proctor and comedian Michael Wolf (Comedy Central, MTV) has combined bar-room trivia with real SAT quizzes to create NYC's booziest classroom. Whether you've...

A very well-known editor told me he only reads page 99 of any given manuscript. If he likes it, great! If not, well, it ends up you-know-where. End of story. Let’s see for ourselves! Bring in page 99 of your manuscript (or the half way page) for the class to critique to help you land that book contract! No manuscript yet? No problem! Just bring your...

At age 37, Richard Wagner—composer, exile, and failed revolutionary—set to work on the project that would consume the next 25 years of his life. By its completion, it had grown into arguably the most ambitious artwork of the 19th century: the monumental cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, a fifteen-hour operatic tetralogy of unprecedented scope and...

James Shapiro leads participants through the pair of plays that the Public Theater will stage this summer at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, offering insights into the language, style and performance histories of the plays, with the goal of preparing theatergoers to get the most out of seeing these productions.

So many actors want to write but are unsure how to start. Others are intimidated. But why should that be? Many of the skills needed to write – understanding how dialogue reveals character, how scenes are structured, how the action of the play reveals the truth of the story – are skills every good actor already has. This class will teach actors...

There's something fishy happening here. Rooted in illusion and invention, the artist-as-trickster archetype is found all over the world and has endured for millennia. Manifesting as Coyote in North America, Hermes in Greece, Krishna in India, Loki in Scandinavia, the Monkey in China, and the Zulu trickster Thlokunyana in Africa, creative destruction...

Teachings on the afterlife journey and reincarnation are found in both ancient religious traditions and contemporary consciousness research. Kabbalah, Tibetan Buddhism and near-death experience literature all presents information on the inner dimensions of dying and on the afterlife journey of the soul. In this workshop we shall explore the application...

It’s been said that where talent hits a target others can’t reach, genius hits a target others can’t see. The ambiguities of this remark can have no better illustration than the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Born into fabulous wealth under the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1889, in 1951 Wittgenstein dies a retired professor in England — and...