Literature Classes in NYC, New York

Ovid begins his Metamorphoses, “My soul would speak of bodies changed into new forms,” and it is the great theme of physical transformation that unites the poem’s many myths: humans becomes animals and plants, and vice versa; humans becomes stones and constellations; and humans change their sex. No poem from antiquity has so influenced Western...

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...

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...

Join us for our first online book club! Hosted by Adrien, book lover and trained art historian, the Coucou Book Club’s aim is to practice French through a literary, emotional and esthetic-driven approach, which will translate well to an online setting. * This class will take place online via the video conference platform ZOOM * About the Book:...

Do capitalist societies have an inherent tendency toward economic, social, and political crises?  Political economists have, over the course of the past 250 years, offered different frameworks to understand the existence of crises within capitalism: from Adam Smith’s “general glut” (when production exceeds demand) to Marx’s belief that...

Elizabeth Bishop is a modern North American poet who is hard to identify in terms of a single school of poetry, place, or home. She writes poems linked to her native ground of Nova Scotia and Massachusetts, yet she is also a poet who famously writes of travel. Brazil, where she lived for twenty years, was home away from home for her, as was Key West,...

Speculative fiction and Hugo awarding-winning writer N.K. Jemisin sits down with organizer and activist Whitney Hu to discuss her forthcoming novel, The City We Became (March 2020).   The story follows six characters -- each avatars of the five boroughs, and one of the city as a whole (based on demographic research done by Jemisin) as they...

This course is designed to help students become more confident and proficient readers in English.  Students explore a variety of genres (websites, short stories, etc.) and reading skills (vocabulary-building, summarizing, critical thinking, etc.). Important: An ESL Placement Test score is required for all new students registering for this course.If...

Architect Steve Bass presents a view of the proportional idea based in the ancient philosophical systems of Pythagoras, Plato and later Neo-Platonists.  In this view number and geometry, the substance of proportion, are endowed with qualitative, harmonic, life-like properties.  These ideas are then linked to numerical and geometrical methods...

"In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks." - John Muir Join us for a light-hearted look at trees! We will seek to identify a few trees and search for the poems hidden in the furrows of bark and in the slenderest of branches.   This class leans heavily toward the whimsical.  Featuring fresh vocabulary...

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.

Composed sometime between the seventh and eighth centuries B.C., Homer's Odyssey is one of the oldest works of world literature and the ancestor of virtually every narrative that involves a difficult journey home. The longing to return home is for Odysseus is the longing of a man to recover his identity as a king, husband, and father after having...