Core Seminars: Interpretations and Modernities

This course is dedicated to one of the greatest, and most challenging, works of modern philosophy: Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment.

Studying its written compilation and redaction; its narrative structure; its rhetorical strategies and its major themes.

A study of George Eliot’s  Middlemarch (1871-72)—a “home epic” and “one of the few English novels for grown-up people.”

A careful reading of Karl Marx’s classic critique of capitalism, Capital volume 1.

What can words say that images cannot, and what can images say that words cannot?

An extended reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) as modernist and postcolonial epic. 

Mainly British modernism, with emphasis on literature between the two world wars and a little after.

This course takes up Paul Ricoeur’s configuration just as these authors ask us to: with suspicion.

In this course we will reflect on the relation between Galileo’s anti-Aristotelian physics and Hobbes’ system by reading key texts and criticisms.

A psychological study of love, marriage, and family through literature, visual arts, and music, from the ancient world to mid-century America.

Adaptations of literary texts are the bread and butter of visual narrative media like TV and film. 

How should we situate AI, when viewed through the lens of culture at large, within the story of modernity?

This course explores the Western conception of the human place in the natural world as it has shifted across four centuries. 

For a long time, early film theory and criticism have been overlooked and underestimated.

Fear is a dominant political, cultural, social, and economic force today. Its importance is often overlooked, especially in film and media studies.

Close reading of the eighteenth-century Chinese novel The Dream of the Red Chamber, with particular attention to historical context. 

An advanced introduction to William Butler Yeats’s life and works, focusing on his development as poet, dramatist, and essayist.

The seminar looks closely at the most influential poem of the 20th century, T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”

A name, a puzzle to be solved, a mirage-like figure provoking writers like Jorge Luis Borges to step beyond staid literary models. Kafka.

Perhaps no other poet has left behind such a rigorous and exhaustive (and beautiful) interrogation of the relationship between mind and reality. 

Selected novels by Henry James, from Roderick Hudson through The Golden Bowl. 

This seminar engages in the interpretation of a single great book, Moby-Dick (1851) by Herman Melville.

The course is interested in critically tracing the echoes regarding ‘the political’ between early modernity and our own times.

Focus on close-reading Hart Crane’s complete poetic oeuvre.

In this advanced seminar on Paradise Lost, we will focus on live critical issues and on Milton’s engagements of key predecessors.

This course explores Italian Futurism, one of the most dynamic and controversial avant-garde movements of the early 20th century.

T 7:00p-8:50p

Study and discussion of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Philosophical Investigations, and On Certainty,.

This course is an intensive study of the ethics of Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.

This course is a seminar on the complete short stories of Clarice Lispector (1920-1977), a master of the genre.

What and when is modernity? This course surveys concepts and controversies in and among select works.

An introduction to college-level study of the humanities through intensive exploration of the songs of Bob Dylan.