Literature Classes in Washington, DC

While walking on the cliffs above the Adriatic near Duino Castle in Trieste, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke claims to have heard a voice on the wind, saying: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?” This dramatic question, which is part mystical experience and part an act of self-mythologizing, urged the poet to write a group...

Online Class with guest lecturers Professor Miles Grier and Dr. Farah Karim-Cooper Join Shakespeare scholar Richard McCoy for an examination of the racial politics in three of his great tragedies: Titus Andronicus, Othello, and Antony and Cleopatra. Professor Miles Grier of Queens College and Dr. Farah Karim-Cooper of Shakespeare’s Globe will...

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 scenario is simple: cat loves mouse, mouse throws brick at cat, police dog claps mouse in jail. George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, a massy, virtuosic work of modernist comics, builds on the structure of a love triangle a whole world of surreal visual experimentation, linguistic play, social critique, and every possible kind of laughter.  Set...

“It is human to have compassion for the suffering.” So begins Giovanni Boccaccio’s extraordinary classic, the Decameron, a collection of one hundred short stories written in 1353, just five years after the Great Plague of 1348 that claimed millions of lives throughout Europe and more than half of the population of Boccaccio’s hometown,...

Virginia Woolf is widely known for her fiction, perhaps most remembered for her novels—from Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse to Orlando and The Waves. Yet, Woolf was also a master of the essay, and she wrote both short and long-form essays to reflect on the art of fiction, on the vocation of the writer more broadly, as well as on the pressing...

This program is taking place remotely. If you have signed up, you will receive an email with details of how to access the program.  If we are able to offer an in-person version of this class in the coming months, we will contact you and make both options available to you. __________________ Join author Stephanie Rabinowitz for an exciting...

The How to Eat Cake: Cunnilingus Workshop is an oral sex workshop that helps participants learn their way around down there and discover the best techniques for giving toe-curling cunnilingus! Five Things You Need to Know About The Class: Class sizes are small and cover the female sexual anatomy, tools, tips, techniques and tricks. All participants...

The Prisoner, the fifth volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and the opening passage of le roman Albertine, “the Albertine cycle,” is a portrait of obsessive love. Albertine, the prisoner of the title, prowls the golden cage of the narrator’s house, swathed in luxury, the object of his jealous, possessive fixation. How does romantic love...

Full Course Name: Communities Under Capitalism: Meeting our Needs During Crisis When government fails to help us through times of crisis, how can we meet each other's daily needs and make sure our communities are taken care of? In the face of capitalism that often feels ruthless we must look to other forms of community care. These are the activities...