Core Seminars

This seminar engages in the interpretation of a single great book, Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. Some attention is given to its historical and literary context, with readings in Emerson, Hawthorne, Webster, and Douglass, Shakespeare and Montaigne, and Melville’s other writings.

The seminar looks closely at the most influential poem of the 20th century, T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” as a radical modernist experiment and as carrying on a kaleidoscopic dialogue with world literature, including the Buddha’s Fire Sermon, the Upanishads, the Holy Grail myth, and others.

Debates about the meaning of freedom from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Authors to be studied include Smith, Montesquieu, Constant, Tocqueville, Mill, Marx and Schmitt on questions of progress, representation, constitutionalism, democracy and individuality.

Culture wars are all the rage these days. But why do we say that works of art are political? What does that even mean? And, if it is true, what part do works of art play in the dynamics of social contest?  In concert with the special exhibition “Art, Protest, and the Archives” at the Beinecke, this seminar explores those questions by placing major works of literature in conversation with influential works of political and cultural theory.

This course explores the world of William Blake’s poetry, with an emphasis on the longer prophetic poems, in conversation with his artistic output. We locate Blake in his historical moment, responding in his poetry and art to a variety of political, philosophical, and aesthetic movements in England and elsewhere. 

A close reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s masterpiece, Emile. Though the book poses as a guide to education, it has much grander aspirations; it offers a whole vision of the human condition. Rousseau called it his “best and worthiest work” and said he believed it would spark a revolution in the way that human beings understand themselves.