Literature Classes in Washington, DC

Delve into some of the best short novels of the 20th century. Spend the first weeks of summer delving into some of the best short novels. 

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

What is poetry and what is it good for? These questions have long haunted practitioners and readers of this “beautiful and pointless” art, to quote the contemporary critic David Orr. But “beautiful and pointless” were not always the terms of the debate. On the contrary, these questions about what poetry is and what it does mean something profoundly...

How are we to understand loneliness today? It appears that we are facing a mass epidemic of loneliness—one perhaps exacerbated by virological pandemic of COVID-19. Britain has appointed a Minister of Loneliness to counter rising rates of isolation. Approximately 20-43 percent of American adults over the age of 60 experience “frequent or intense...

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 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...

In many ways, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is a haunted book—and in turn, one that has haunted readers and writers since its publication in 1847. Join us for a series of lectures that begin with Brontë’s classic Gothic novel, then continue into its literary afterlife, up to the present moment. We will read Jane Eyre alongside texts that take...