Interpretations Seminars

How can we live well in periods of instability, when the founding ideas of our civilization come under threat? What does it mean to be ethical in a situation you cannot control? Can bewilderment be a virtue? What role might poetry play in living a good life?

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.

Claude McKay was the preeminent queer black leftist poet, novelist, and political thinker of the early 20th century. This course covers the full range of his many contributions.

HUMS 346. A scrupulous reading of Nietzsche’s “great” book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. We ask what it means to philosophize in and as literature, and how this reckless experiment transforms both.

A close examination of Mann’s most ambitious novel which seeks to elucidate the German mind. Broad exploration of the context of Doctor Faustus through readings in history, literature, literary history, music history and music theory, history of religion and theology. 

An intensive study of George Eliot’s  Middlemarch (1871-72)—a work she called a “home epic” and Virginia Woolf  declared “one of the few English novels for grown-up people.”   Our close reading of Middlemarch itself is framed by a brief selection from George Eliot’s essays and short fiction, as well as by a more extended study of some critical responses, both Victorian and modern.

An extended reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) as modernist and postcolonial epic. Beginning with considerations of the relationship of modern epic and novel, the class will study Joyce’s re-working of Homeric epic in modern Irish, “World Literature,” Western and postcolonial literary contexts. 

Intensive study of the life and work of Simone Weil, one of the twentieth century’s most important thinkers. We read the iconic works that shaped Weil’s posthumous reputation as “the patron saint of all outsiders,” including the mystical aphorisms Gravity and Grace and the utopian program for a new Europe The Need for Roots. 

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. 

A close reading (in English) of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, with emphasis upon major themes: time and memory, desire and jealousy, social life and artistic experience, sexual identity and personal authenticity, class and nation.

HUMS 319. A study of the poetry of John Ashbery (1927-2017) through examining the films, music, and art that provoked his imagination and structured and inhabited his poems. Critiques of the interdisciplinarity of Ashbery’s poetics.

HUMS 415: An exploration of Chartres Cathedral as a meeting point of various artistic, technological, ritual, literary, intellectual, and social trends in the High Middle Ages.  We study how the cathedral fit into and changed the world around it, HU