Literature (LITR1-CE)

LITR1-CE 9001 An Afternoon with Thoreau: What Walden Means Today (0 Credits)

The 2016 bicentennial of the birth of Henry David Thoreau has been the occasion of a wide-ranging reassessment of Thoreau as an essayist and journal-keeper, a naturalist, and a prophetic moral voice. At the center of all the attention remains Thoreau’s experiment in living a life of simplicity and quiet reflection in a cabin beside a wooded pond, recorded in his now classic 1854 publication Walden; or, Life in the Woods. By reading selections from Walden and other writings from his broad range of work, we will examine Thoreau’s reflections in the context of his own mid-19th-century America and contemplate his relevance for our 21st-century culture and current environmentalist thinking.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9002 Classical Mythology (0 Credits)

This class introduces the myths of Ancient Greece and Rome, examining the ways that myths were taken up, reimagined, and repurposed in Greek and Latin literature. Each of our five sessions will cover a different classical author- Homer, Sappho, Lucretius, Vergil, and Ovid- from whom we’ll read small selections in translation. By the end of the course, you will be familiar with some of the core mythic traditions in the Greco-Roman world as well as the ways that myths were understood, adapted, and challenged over time. We will consider some of the different definitions of classical myth, the relationship between myth and religion in antiquity, critiques of traditional mythology levied by philosophers and other sceptics, and the ways in which myths were often co-opted for political and ideological purposes. This course is appropriate for those who are new to classical mythology as well as those with some prior knowledge of the classical world.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9003 The Generations of Jewish American Fiction (0 Credits)

This course surveys Jewish American fiction from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, surveying the initial immigrant experience, the splendors and sorrows and assimilation, and the redefinition and self-questioning of writers from generations X and Y (Millennials). We will reconsider reputations that are well established and discuss important writers who have until recently hovered beneath the horizon of awareness. We will also focus on the deployment of form in Jewish-American fiction and the interaction of style, culture, and representation, Readings include Anzia Yezierska, The Bread-Givers; Bernard Malamud, The Assistant; Saul Bellow, Seize The Day; Philip Roth, Operation Shylock; Cynthia Ozick, Antiquities; Joshua Cohen, Moving Kings; Emily Barton, The Book of Esther; Dalia Sofer, The Septembers of Shiraz.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9004 Greek and Roman Mythology in Popular Culture (0 Credits)

Register for this Fall 2022 course on the new <a href="https://nyusps.gatherlearning.com/events/greek-and-roman-mythology-in-popular-culture">NYU SPS Academy of Lifelong Learning</a> website.   In this five-session class, we will explore aspects of the reception of Greco-Roman myth in various popular contemporary media. Each class will be devoted to a different medium: TV, music, books, visual art, and internet culture. How do the forms of ancient mythology make it suitable for meme culture? How do pop representations of famous mythical and historical characters (Hercules, Zeus, Cleopatra, and others) square with their ancient receptions? How does engaging with pop culture from a mythical perspective help us be more mindful of diversity and political ideology? We will ask these and other questions through various readings in translation and analyses of contemporary pop culture, including Star Wars, Taylor Swift, Station Eleven (both the book and the TV show), among others. Fall 2022 tuition is $399.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9005 African-American Crime Fiction (0 Credits)

At once a form of entertainment and serious social exploration, part of popular culture and the literary field, African-American crime fiction interrogates injustices in policing, imprisonment, and social inequality while showcasing the crime novel as a quintessential modern fictional form.  The characteristics of the genre as one that engages issues of labor, class, gender, and sexuality with an urbane flair and often sly humor set it apart. The ability of authors writing within the genre to trace the antecedents, processes, and consequences surrounding crime, exploitation, and oppression make the African-American crime novel more relevant than ever. Readings include: Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go; Iceberg Slim, Night Train to Sugar Hill; Donald Goines, Whoreson; Ernest Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying; Tayari Jones, An American Marriage; Attica Locke, Bluebird, Bluebird.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9006 Literature and Medicine: Reading and Writing About Illness and Healing (0 Credits)

Illness, recovery, and healing are universal human experiences and, therefore, often prevalent themes in great literature. In this class, we read and discuss selections of both fiction, like William Carlos Williams’s story “The Use of Force,” and nonfiction, such as Walt Whitman’s and Louisa May Alcott’s journals of nursing during the Civil War and Fanny Burney’s harrowing account of surgery without anesthesia. The course covers Susan Sontag’s classic work Illness as Metaphor, contemporary essays by Oliver Sacks, short fiction by Joan Leegant, and poetry by Jo Shapcott, as well as works by other writers and poets. There will be discussion and opportunities to reflect on your own experiences in occasional responsive writings.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9007 Kafka and Company: Art or Life? (0 Credits)

Franz Kafka is in interesting company when he explores a universal dilemma: is dedication to one’s calling (writing, painting, music) compatible with creature comforts? This course examines the choice between art and life faced by creative individuals. We read Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” and “The Judgment,” in which the protagonist experiences high anxiety regarding solitude versus marriage; Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, based on Paul Gauguin, who abandoned his family to pursue painting; Alain-Fournier’s haunting novel, The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes), which poses the question: who is more creative, the staid narrator who has written this self-reflective novel or his wild and adventurous main character who lives life as if it were a work of art; Goethe’s autobiographical bestseller, The Sorrows of Young Werther, about an artist too sensitive to thrive in the real world; and brief excerpts from Thomas Mann’s Werther-inspired Lotte in Weimar. Handouts feature observations on creativity by Beethoven, van Gogh, Woolf, Baudelaire, Rilke, Kazantzakis, and others.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9008 Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (0 Credits)

Seen as an artistic failure or an overgrown children’s book until the 1920s, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is now widely accepted as the greatest single work of American literature with indelible scenes, characters, and storylines. This course will provide an intensive focus on the book, examining its characters and themes closely while also considering the cultural background of Melville’s America, divided by issues of race and expansion and facing a deepening political rift that would lead to civil war. Melville was that rare writer who was both supremely talented and laden with knowledge of a highly technical subject, in this case whaling and voyaging. This makes for a book like no other.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9009 Women of the Mystery: From Agatha Christie to J. K. Rowling (0 Credits)

The mystery is one of the most popular genres in English literature, consistently occupying at least a quarter of any bestseller list. Interestingly, women authors have dominated the form since its inception. Why is this? And furthermore, why are the detectives usually male? This course explores the origins of detective fiction and the prominent role that women writers have played in enhancing its literary reputation. We will read books by award-winning authors that are highly regarded for their excellent writing and great storytelling—otherwise known as page-turners. Authors include Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Josephine Tey, P. D. James, Elizabeth George, Tana French, Donna Leon, and J. K. Rowling (aka Robert Galbraith).

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9010 Murder, Mayhem, Mystery: The Usual Suspects with Unusual Stories (0 Credits)

Murder, mayhem, and mystery seem to have a stranglehold on the weekly New York Times list of bestselling novels. In this course, explore what makes mystery the lynchpin of modern fiction, and examine why readers are perennially enthralled by the perverse and the deadly. Selections span a broad international range, from the founders of the genre in the 19th century (Agatha Christie) to the 21st century (Paula Hawkins). Focus will be on how the genre has changed in style and subject matter over the years while retaining its readership. Readings include Agatha Christie, The ABC Murders; Georges Simenon, A Crime in Holland; Iain Pears, The Last Judgement; Henning Mankell, Firewall; Ruth Rendell, Not in the Flesh; Robert Galbraith (aka J. K. Rowling), Career of Evil; Ian McEwan, Nutshell; and Paula Hawkins, Into the Water.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9011 Beowulf and the Beginnings of English Literature (0 Credits)

The new feminist translation of the early English epic Beowulf by Maria Dahvana Headley (Macmillan, 2020) has brought renewed interest in this stirring medieval saga. Beowulf has a particular cultural position as almost the sole extant imaginative document from its era and as a signpost in the complicated origin story of the English language. Comparing Headley’s translation to earlier versions by Seamus Heaney and J.R.R. Tolkien, we will examine Beowulf’s heroic quest to slay the evil monster Grendel; the roles of gender and power in the presentation of Grendel’s mother; the importance of loyalty, courage, and honor in a dark and dangerous world; and Beowulf’s final struggle against a giant dragon and the metaphysical threats he represents.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9012 Discovering the Modern: The Novels of E.M. Forster (0 Credits)

Register for this Fall 2023 course on the new <a href="https://nyusps.gatherlearning.com/events/discovering-the-modern-the-novels-of-em-forster">NYU SPS Academy of Lifelong Learning website</a>. The subject of multiple acclaimed film adaptations and admired by critics as different as Lionel Trilling, Frank Kermode, and Zadie Smith, E. M. Forster wrote six novels that chronicle the development of a modern sensibility in English and global society. Examining issues of class and gender, sexuality and colonialism, cohesion and alienation, Forster’s novels are funny, incongruous, and revelatory. They also display an author determined to keep the novel a sustainable, renewable form in the twentieth century. We will read, in order, Forster’s six novels: Where Angels Fear To Tread, The Longest Journey, A Room With A View, Howards End, Passage to India, and the posthumously published Maurice, his compelling novel of same-sex love. We will also read Frank Kermode’s short critical book, Concerning E. M. Forster. Fall 2023 tuition is $499. Registering at least three weeks prior to the course start date is highly recommended.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9013 Playing Desert Solitaire with Edward Abbey (0 Credits)

Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness just happened to be published and to become an almost-instant cult classic in 1968, a tumultuous year for the United States and the world. The collection of essays draws upon Abbey’s three years as a park ranger in the labyrinthine deserts of southeastern Utah. Writing in a manner that is at once rude and sensitive, angry and loving, Abbey projects the voice of a latter-day prophet, not only crying out in the wilderness, but crying out for the wilderness. Abbey’s desert experiences provide what Thoreau once so poignantly called for: “Contact! Contact!”—direct encounters with earth and rock, sky and water. Abbey’s radical work helped to inspire the Earth First! advocacy movement. But today, the environmental crises that animated his protest have escalated beyond anything he might have envisioned in his day: global warming, shale oil fracking, mountain-top removal mining. What can the late Abbey say to us now? What can he do for us now?

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9014 American Literature 1865 to 1920: Five Major Authors (0 Credits)

The years between the end of the Civil War and the end of the First World War saw the emergence of American fiction to world status. Focusing on five major authors of the period. Henry James (Portrait Of A Lady, two sessions), Mark Twain (Tom Sawyer and Pudd’nhead Wilson), Charles Chesnutt (The House Behind the Cedars and The Marrow of Tradition), Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth and Summer), and Willa Cather (O Pioneers and My Antonia), We will see how the gender, racial, and regional diversity of American rakers accommodated a different modes of symbolism, local color, realism, and naturalism to paint a vivid picture of an emerging American modernity. Students should read Portrait of a Lady for the first session. Questions? Contact us at The Center for Applied Liberal Arts (CALA). Email sps.cala@nyu.edu or call 212-998-7289.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9015 George Eliot's "Middlemarch" in the 21st Century (0 Credits)

Long acclaimed as the indispensable novel of nineteenth-century realism, an exemplar of moral seriousness and, as Virginia Woolf said, one of the few novels In English written for grown-ups, George Eliot’s Middlemarch is being reinterpreted for the twenty-first century. Today, readers may perceive the novel as commentary on a cholera epidemic, the coal conditions in the midlands of England, the perilous interconnections of community, or the aspirations of women in a still-patriarchal society. Middlemarch is a novel about how ambitions—Dorothea Brooke’s for a life of achievement, Tertius Lydgate’s for scientific renown, Edward Casaubon’s for intellectual mastery—are doomed to defeat and compromise. At the same time, it is also a book that enlarges our sense of possibility and the ways that fiction can offer a meaningful understanding of other people’s lives, something of which we are still in need of today. We will read the first two books of Middlemarch, “Miss Broke” and “Old And Young,” for the first class.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9016 Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Revisited (0 Credits)

A year after it was published in 1974, Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and subsequently was listed on Modern Library’s 100 Best Nonfiction Books. Dillard wrote Pilgrim after completing a master’s thesis on Thoreau’s Walden, and it is so much in the spirit of that American classic that writer Ed Abbey has called her Thoreau’s “true heir.” Although Dillard has said that she does not regard herself as a “nature writer,” she does uniquely combine fascinating nature observations with overarching philosophical and religious questions in a vibrant and highly charged first-person style. In this course, we will read and discuss Dillard’s Pilgrim, as well as a few short selections from her other writings. Our discussions will probe the themes and issues that pervade Dillard’s work and consider her place in the contemporary American literary landscape.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9017 The Wilderness World of John Muir (0 Credits)

The epitome of the free-spirited naturalist, John Muir (1838–1914) famously tramped through wilderness areas from California and the Southwest to Alaska on foot and without gun or sleeping bag, in a complete immersion in North America’s natural world. For John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, going to the mountains was “going home.” Muir’s deep appreciation for nature led him to his greatest legacy—preservation. During a three-day camping trip with Teddy Roosevelt, he convinced the president of the need for a national program of conservation, which led to the expansion and strengthening of the national park system. This class will begin with an overview of Muir’s life and work, including slides and film clips, and then turn to discussion of selected writings by Muir. In our examination of Muir’s life and legacy, we also will consider his distinctive voice of his writing—the exulting voice of America’s premiere naturalist, to whom each day was always “the morning of creation.”

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9018 The Eighteenth-Century Novel: Britain and France (0 Credits)

The 18th century saw the rise of the novel in its modern form. Through studying major authors and texts from the period in both Britain and France, we will see the various shapes the novel took, from the epistolary mode comprised of fictional letters to the omniscient narrator who framed a whole swath of action in a knowing voice, from realism to fantasy to utopia, and from observant satire to inward-looking psychology. Readings include: Samuel Richardson, Pamela (two sessions), Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (two sessions), Abbé Prévost, Manon Lescaut, Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Françoise de Graffigny, Letters from a Peruvian Woman, Voltaire, Candide, Sarah Scott, Millennium Hall, Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Students should read Pamela for the first session. Questions? Contact us at The Center for Applied Liberal Arts (CALA). Email sps.cala@nyu.edu or call 212-998-7289.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9020 American Noir Novels (0 Credits)

A hybrid of the gothic novel and the detective story, American “noir” fiction serves not only as a unique contribution to the mystery novel, but also as a formidable genre in its own right. Both utterly realistic and profoundly oneiric, the mean streets and nightmare alleys of these novels, along with their world-weary heroes and femme fatales, have evolved into literary and cultural symbols with archetypal resonance. We will explore classic American noir novels as expressions of social and political protest and commentary, as well as aesthetically satisfying and dramatic renderings of an entire psychology—or even as a manifestation of a singular existential philosophy. Readings include two major precursors of noir and six modern noir classics: The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Edgar Allan Poe; The Turn of the Screw, Henry James; The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain; The Expendable Man, Dorothy B. Hughes; Nightmare Alley, William Lindsay Gresham; Rendezvous in Black, Cornell Woolrich; Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith; The Real Cool Killers, Chester Himes; and Pop. 1280, Jim Thompson.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9021 Shakespeare: Wenches, Witches, and Wives (0 Credits)

Explore three Shakespearean masterpieces and the cultural forces that helped to shape them: The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare’s wry, controversial commentary on 16th-century women’s lib; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its enchanted woods, star-crossed lovers, bumbling troupe of amateur actors, and depiction of virginity as a fate worse than death; and Macbeth, a study of the psychological effects of evil on a man who sells his soul to the devil for political power.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9022 Memoirs with a Social Conscience (0 Credits)

WE’RE SORRY, BUT SECTION 1 IS CLOSED/FULL. IF YOU WISH TO BE ADDED TO A WAITING LIST, PLEASE SEND AN EMAIL TO <a href="mailto:SPS.CALA@NYU.EDU" target="_blank">SPS.CALA@NYU.EDU</a> OR CALL 212-998-7289. WE WILL TRY TO OPEN UP A SECOND SECTION IF THERE ARE ENOUGH PEOPLE ON THE WAITING LIST. Many nonfiction writers address issues of social justice not so much with facts and figures but through compelling personal stories, often their own. When truly successful in relating personal stories to the larger social and political framework, these writers have influenced generations of readers as well as society as a whole. We will read Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Elie Wiesel, Night; Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, Farewell to Manzanar; John Hersey, Hiroshima; James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time; James McBride, The Color of Water; Deanna Fei, Girl in Glass; and Alison Bechtel, Fun Home. Active participation in class discussion is encouraged. Please read Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl for the first class.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9026 Shakespeare: Unfriendly Persuasion (0 Credits)

Explore two of Shakespeare’s best-loved plays and the cultural forces that helped to shape them: Richard III and Much Ado About Nothing, both centering on persuasion by deceit. Don John, Ado’s evil mastermind, handily turns mirth to mayhem when he concocts an illusion making a virtuous bride-to-be look like a strumpet. Richard III is arguably Shakespeare’s most charismatic villain, reveling nonstop in his homicidal, hypocritical journey to absolute power. His world, however, is strikingly modern, one in which rhetoric is used to dupe and corrupt and people can be led to believe almost anything. Indeed, we are left with the suspicion that perhaps all politics is about appearance rather than reality and that Richard is a Machiavellian, even Hitlerian, prototype—a prototype of which we have not seen the last.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9028 Summer Intensive: Modern British Drama in London (0 Credits)

Now in its 16th season, this program is a thrilling experience for anyone who loves theater. In the morning, learn about the history of Great Britain’s exciting theater scene from World War II to the present, the golden age when audiences were introduced to some of the world’s most influential playwrights. In the evening, attend new productions in London’s West End and the occasional show in off-West End and/or Fringe playhouses. Over the course of two weeks, see at least nine productions. Previous classes were the first to see such award-winning international hits as War Horse; One Man, Two Guvnors; Twelfth Night featuring Mark Rylance; and the critically acclaimed play, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Topics include the history of post-World War II British theater, an examination of more than a dozen major playwrights and more than 20 plays, and an exploration of the present-day theater scene and its influence on U.S. theater.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9029 Five African Nobel Laureates (1 Credit)

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9031 Masterpieces of 19th-Century Fiction (0 Credits)

Register for this Fall 2023 course on the new <a href="https://nyusps.gatherlearning.com/events/masterpieces-of-19th-century-fiction---fall-2023">NYU SPS Academy of Lifelong Learning website.</a> Study five major 19th-century classics that have passed the test of time: a gothic tour de force and literature's first science fiction novel, providing us the world’s most beloved monster; an iconic French novel whose audacious hero’s ambitions are positively Napoleonic; an astute comic novel depicting the way changing times unsettle manners, morals, and religion in an English cathedral town; an elegant psychological study of an American girl from Albany who inherits a fortune and seeks a big life in European society; a controversial rags-to-riches novel set at the dawn of the “American century.”  Readings: Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley; The Red and the Black, by Stendhal; Barchester Towers, by Anthony Trollope; Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James; Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser. Students should read Frankenstein for the first class. Fall 2023 tuition is $449 Registering at least three weeks prior to the course start date is highly recommended.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9035 Wit Against the Patriarchy: Midcentury Women Writers (0 Credits)

Amid the turbulence of the modern world, and often under the constraints imposed by the patriarchal establishment, mid-20th-century women writers crafted witty, insightful, and trenchant prose that helped to bring the innovations of the avant-garde into mainstream literature. In this course, we will discuss writers from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand who are as relevant now as ever. Readings will include Kathleen Collins’s Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?, Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women, Elizabeth Harrower’s The Watch Tower, Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus, Janet Frame’s Owls Do Cry, Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe, Dawn Powell’s A Time to Be Born, Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day. Students should read Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie for the first class.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9036 The Short Story: Coming of Age (0 Credits)

Baudelaire says that “genius is … childhood recaptured,” and without question, some of our most important fiction—from Twain to Salinger to Harper Lee—is rendered through the eyes of younger protagonists. In this course, read a variety of moving literary short stories by writers from diverse backgrounds and regions, including John Updike, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Ernest Hemingway, Jamaica Kincaid, and Junot Díaz. Explore powerful tales on such issues as family and belonging, authority and independence, and tradition versus rebellion through characters who transcend their age group and capture the universal struggle to understand one’s place in the world.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9037 New York Stories: Literature of the Lower East Side (0 Credits)

In this course, we will examine the works of authors from the Lower East Side of Manhattan. This neighborhood, home to many European immigrants, has produced a significant number of literary works, all of which help us gain insight into the life and realities of those who settled there. We will see the way in which the neighborhood itself becomes a kind of constant background character in this particular literary tradition, as well as analyze the reason for such great literary production in an area marked by poverty and hardship. In addition, we will examine the way in which the LES has come to symbolize a mythical launching pad for success in the New World, and how early hardships are perceived as a rite of passage in an idealized manner, as well as how various groups have sought (and continue to seek) to reconnect with the LES for the “authentic” life experience it has come to represent.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9038 Reading James Joyce's Dubliners (0 Credits)

Review in detail the first work of fiction penned by the 20th century's most influential writer. Explore the development of a modernist writer as he creates stories that exemplify the life stages of childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life. Study the book's 15 stories in terms of Joyce's writing commitment, conveying everything through suggestion rather than direct statement––and the three key concepts of Dubliners: paralysis, gnomon, and simony. Learn about Joyce's eight-year ordeal as he struggled to get Dubliners published. The Vintage International paperback, edited by Hans Walter Gabler, is the edition used in class. Please read the first three stories for the first session.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9039 Late Victorian and Edwardian Short Fiction (0 Credits)

The years 1880 to 1914 saw the transformation of British prose from sprawling Victorian novels to more concise and self-consciously crafted modern fiction. In these texts, readers see the rise of the New Woman; the paradoxical role of adventure and genre fiction in accelerating artistic innovation; the ramifications of empire in Scotland, India, South Africa, and Australia; the challenges posed by connivers, strivers, harridans, and vampires; and ongoing literary tensions between the novel as entertainment and high art. Reading list: W. Somerset Maugham, Liza of Lambeth (to be read in advance of the first class); Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career; George Gissing, New Grub Street; Rudyard Kipling, Kim; and Bram Stoker, Dracula. Students are encouraged to enroll in the second part of the course, <a href="https://www.sps.nyu.edu/professional-pathways/courses/LITR1-CE9040-late-victorian-and-edwardian-short-fiction-ii.html" target="_blank">Late Victorian and Edwardian Short Fiction II/LITR1-CE9040</a>.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9040 Late Victorian and Edwardian Short Fiction II (0 Credits)

The years 1880 to 1914 saw the transformation of British prose from sprawling Victorian novels to more concise and self-consciously crafted modern fiction. In these texts, readers see the rise of the New Woman; the paradoxical role of adventure and genre fiction in accelerating artistic innovation; the ramifications of empire in Scotland, India, South Africa, and Australia; the challenges posed by connivers, strivers, harridans, and vampires; and ongoing literary tensions between the novel as entertainment and high art. Reading list: H. G. Wells, Ann Veronica (to be read in advance of the first class); Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent; Henry James, The Awkward Age; Arnold Bennett, Anna of the Five Towns; Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier. This course may be taken alone or as a continuation of <a href="https://www.sps.nyu.edu/professional-pathways/courses/LITR1-CE9039-late-victorian-and-edwardian-short-fiction.html" target="_blank">Late Victorian and Edwardian Short Fiction/LITR1-CE9039</a>.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9041 Coming of Age in America (0 Credits)

From Huck Finn to The Catcher in the Rye, many classics of American literature are coming of age novels, or bildungsromans. Focusing on the journey from childhood to adulthood, these novels grapple with the painful self-consciousness and overwrought sexuality of adolescence as well as the heavy influence of peers. Discuss what these novels reveal about coming of age in a country that is in its own adolescence. Texts include classics Huck Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, and The Bluest Eyes, as well as contemporary bestsellers The Virgin Suicides and Forever. Discussions are supplemented by films, including The Graduate and Pretty in Pink.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9042 Satire: Hypocrisy, Vice, and Folly in Literature (0 Credits)

Satire is one of the most enduring genres of literature through time and across cultures—after all, every age and every culture has its own hypocrisy, vice, and folly to expose and ridicule. Explore classic and contemporary books that vividly depict satire. Discuss how they function, the reasons are they were written, and why satire remains an important—and entertaining—genre. Readings include Aristophanes, Lysistrata; Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels; Nikolai Gogol, The Nose; George Orwell, Animal Farm; Dawn Powell, A Time To Be Born; James Thurber, Selected Stories; and Garry Trudeau, The Revolt of the English Majors.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9043 Nervous Conditions: Contemporary Literature of Sub-Saharan Africa (0 Credits)

Nearly 60 years ago, most African nations achieved independence. Since then, African fiction has achieved world notice, even as it has chronicled the struggles of a continent replete with both radical hope and political disappointment. In this course, we read novelists writing in English from sub-Saharan Africa, including Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, and Nigeria, who combine the power of ethical witness with the imaginative writer’s freedom and creativity. Readings include Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat; Zakes Mda, The Heart of Redness; Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions; Aminatta Forna, Happiness; Dinaw Mengestu, All Our Names; and Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9051 The Gothic Heroine (0 Credits)

Register for this Fall 2022 course on the new <a href="https://nyusps.gatherlearning.com/events/the-gothic-heroine">NYU SPS Academy of Lifelong Learning</a> website. Classic gothic heroines like Mina Harker in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) are among the most widely recognized and frequently adapted literary characters. Emerging in the late 18th century and persistently popular in our own time, gothic heroines have come of age along with feminism. Combining elements of romance, horror, mystery, and other genres, these sensational bestsellers illuminate and challenge our concepts of heroism and gender roles. Join us for study and lively discussion of unforgettable heroines from Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey to Sookie Stackhouse in Charlaine Harris’s Dead Until Dark. Questions? Contact us at The Center for Applied Liberal Arts (CALA). Email sps.cala@nyu.edu or call 212-998-7289. Fall 2022 tuition is $549.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9054 Literature for the 21st Century (0 Credits)

Discover a generation of authors likely to set literary trends well into the 21st century. Examine such literary issues as postmodernism and magical realism, and consider the controversies over multiculturalism and the nature of the literary canon. Through close reading and nuanced discussions, explore postmodernism in relation to modernism, intertextuality, pastiche, temporal displacement, and other literary themes.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9065 Unlocking Shakespeare: The Course of True Love (0 Credits)

Explore a rich variety of Shakespeare’s works: the love sonnets—perhaps the greatest love poems in the English language—which were addressed to a man; Love’s Labor’s Lost, in which four lordly bachelors vow, with spectacular failure, to renounce women for the sake of higher learning; and Othello, with its incisive and tragic portrait of sexual jealousy. By the course’s end, understand Shakespeare’s language in both its literary and cultural contexts, and have the resources to enjoy Shakespeare on your own. No previous study of Shakespeare is required.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9070 Making a Murderer: Novels, Documentaries, and Stories of True Crime (0 Credits)

Deepen your knowledge of current events, criminology, psychology, and the powers of storytelling through this course’s exploration of thrilling narratives of crime and punishment. This course draws from popular obsessions, such as the documentary series Making a Murderer and the podcast Serial; classic novels like Camus’s The Stranger and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment; and provocative modern tales such as Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and Michelle McNamara’s investigation of the Golden State Killer I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. We will discuss the blurred line between art and advocacy, narrative’s love of doubt, the reasoning of the criminal mind, killer novelists, and the gravitational pull of the whodunit.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9081 Robert Frost: A Poet Who Took "The Road Not Taken" (0 Credits)

Robert Frost is one of America’s most endearing and enduring literary icons. He is best remembered for his poems devoted to his rural New England landscape (“Birches”) and for his recitation at John F. Kennedy’s 1960 inauguration (“The Gift Outright”). But beneath this veneer of simplicity, there was a much more complex and enigmatic persona. Contradictory in nature, he was a solitary man at heart but reveled in public adulation. This course will delve into the deeper layers of meaning of his poems, explore the complexities of his personal life, and discover how they are interwoven. His frequent use of metaphor—saying one thing and meaning another—is key to the closer examination of his complete works. Beside all the accolades (including honorary degrees from Oxford and Cambridge) and awards (including four Pulitzer Prizes), his love of nature, and his down-home plainness, there lay beneath a troubled man dealing all his life with adversity, family tragedies, and depression. His wide literary influences (including Emerson, Hardy, and Dickinson) were many, but his voice was unique in the pantheon of American poetry.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9082 The Irish Short Story: Oscar Wilde to Edna O'Brien (0 Credits)

The Irish have a well-known heritage of great storytelling, and this centuries-old oral tradition has translated beautifully into a rich and unrivaled history of literary prose. What other country can boast of four Nobel Prizes in Literature (Yeats, Shaw, Beckett, Heaney), as well as the writer who revolutionized the novel—James Joyce? This course will focus on the short story—a true test of masterful writing skills. The stories reflect in a concise way the close connections between family, politics, and religion in the face of historical and cultural change. Readings may include classics of Irish literature by authors such as Oscar Wilde and James Joyce, as well as contemporary writers such as Anne Enright, Edna O’Brien, John Banville, William Trevor, and Colum McCann—all masters of the short story.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9095 Novels with a Social Conscience (0 Credits)

Examine how eight important novelists offer moving, memorable stories that illuminate the injustices evident in cultures and communities. Issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and class are given special focus. We will read George Orwell, Animal Farm; Philip Roth, The Plot Against America; Louise Meriwether, Daddy Was a Number Runner; James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room; Nadine Gordimer, July’s People; Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street; Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place; and Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You. Active participation in class discussions is encouraged. Please read Animal Farm for the first class.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9101 We Must Be Content to Be Human: Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire Chronicles (0 Credits)

Set in the fictitious English county of Barsetshire in the mid-19th century, the six novels that comprise Anthony Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire are often considered his finest work and perhaps the best loved of all Trollope’s novels. Deploying his smart and soothing signature style that can accommodate romance, realism, a sense of great fun, and an epic vision, Trollope addresses the crisis of the time: modernization, which though necessary and inevitable, could threaten the stability of “Deep England.” This issue is explored within the rich context of life itself, with loves and losses, misfortunes and victories, griefs and laughter. This series features many of Trollope’s most memorable heroines, including the potent Mrs. Proudie, the bright and bitter Signora Neroni, the redoubtable Lady Lufton, and the controversial romantic heroine Lily Dale, as well as such memorable persons as the beleaguered Josiah Crawley, the ambitious Archdeacon Grantly, the scheming Obadiah Slope, and the good-hearted <a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/trollope/harding1.html" target="_blank">Rev. Septimus Harding</a>. Whether hero or villain, high or low, all of Trollope’s characters struggle with the ways of the world and are considered with regard to this series’ paramount lesson: “Till we can become divine, we must be content to be human, lest in our hurry for a change we sink to something lower.” Readings (in order): <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Warden" target="_blank">The Warden</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barchester_Towers" target="_blank">Barchester Towers</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Thorne" target="_blank">Doctor Thorne</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framley_Parsonage" target="_blank">Framley Parsonage</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Small_House_at_Allington" target="_blank">The Small House at Allington</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Chronicle_of_Barset" target="_blank">The Last Chronicle of Barset</a>. Note: Students should read The Warden for the first class.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9102 Memoirs from Around the World: Inside the Heart and Soul of Another (0 Credits)

There’s no more exciting or fearsome plot than the course of an unexpected life. These glorious memoirs transport us to different times and places. Through the author’s eyes, you will observe twists of fate, sun-kissed joys, upheavals, raucous family life, wartime nights, and life-altering decisions. We will explore stories about Paris in the 1920s; a lively, educated family under Mussolini; an impish kid in apartheid South Africa; a boy and his mother chased across America; a manly Welsh adventurer changing his sex; a humorist on family holidays; and a black comedy set in a wartime Dutch attic. The books, which are not required reading, include memoirs by Ernest Hemingway, Natalia Ginzburg, Trevor Noah, Tobias Wolff, Calvin Trillin, Jan Morris, and Hans Keilson.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9103 The First World War and British Fiction: Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End (0 Credits)

2018 makes the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War. Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy is unequaled in its portrayal of the convulsive effects of that war on modern civilization. When an exemplary British infantry officer, Christopher Tietjens, finds that his wife Sylvia is having an affair, his convictions and world view change in dramatic and unexpected ways. The world of England’s stately homes begins to teeter, as does Christopher’s life. The calculating wife, the idealistic feminist Valentine Wannop who is his new love, the bureaucratic opportunist Macmaster, and the classic cad Major Perowne each add rich dimensions to this exploration of the emerging modern times that will carry Tietjens along with them. We will examine the way in which Christopher’s tangled relationships speak to that era’s transformations, and the way Ford’s own innovative style is itself inflected by the changes it depicts.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9104 Bob Dylan: American Literature's Defiant Prophet (0 Credits)

The unexpected winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, the poetic songwriter Bob Dylan speaks to the heart of the American vernacular, to our deep spiritual yearnings, and to the continuing search for racial and social justice. At once bardic and deeply allusive, calling on generations-old folk traditions but also resonant with dramatic change, Dylan’s work asks for serious exploration. In this course, we will do just that: examine Dylan’s lyrics, watch videos, and read some of the most insightful scholars of Dylan’s oeuvre. Topics to be covered include whether Dylan embodies this spirit of, as he describes in “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” the “writers and critics / who prophesize” and how his Nobel win changes our sense of literature as a category. We also will discuss his work in depth, including protest songs, such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Masters of War”; surreal dreamscapes, such as “Desolation Row”; love songs like “Lay Lady Lay”; love-hate songs, such as “Shelter from the Storm”; the proto-rap of “Subterranean Homesick Blues”; existential meditations, such as “Jokerman” and “Not Dark Yet”; and—of course—key songs featuring tambourine men, rolling stones, idiot winds, and sad-eyed ladies of the lowland.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9105 Reading Dante's Inferno (0 Credits)

Register for this Summer 2023 course on the new <a href="https://nyusps.gatherlearning.com/events/reading-dantes-inferno">NYU SPS Academy of Lifelong Learning website</a>. Join us for a journey through Hell—Dante’s Inferno—a world in which a fascinating cast of characters, condemned to eternal punishment for sins committed on earth, recount their stories to the poet as he makes his pilgrimage through the underworld. In this first canticle of the Divine Comedy, readers encounter condemned lovers, corrupt popes and politicians, thieves, pagans, and a variety of sinners. Using a reader-friendly translation, we will examine Inferno’s key themes, overall message, and place in cultural and literary history. Summer 2023 tuition is $629.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9106 Shakespeare: The Sonnets (0 Credits)

Shakespeare’s love sonnets belong to a tradition deriving from Francesco Petrarch, whose love poetry swept Europe and initiated the vogue of the sonnet sequence in celebration of the chaste, exalted, unattainable mistress. In Shakespeare’s sonnets, however, this traditional object of devotion is displaced by what was then considered to be two scandalously unorthodox love interests: the bulk of the poems are addressed to a femininely beautiful young man, and the remainder to a rampantly promiscuous woman. Unsurprisingly, these sonnets have spawned a host of vexing questions. Are the poems autobiographical, as is widely believed—a possibility that continues to provoke revulsion and denial? If so, who was the lady (hundreds of pages have been devoted to pondering her identity), and who was the man? Or are they both poetic constructs through which to explore heterodox love?

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9107 Sites of Seduction: Death in Venice and Its Ancient Greek Models (0 Credits)

Autobiographical, sensual, and shocking—Thomas Mann’s novella, Death in Venice, is a masterpiece of modernist fiction. On the surface, Death in Venice is the story of a world-renowned German author who—plagued by frustration, boredom, and writer’s block—succumbs to a forbidden love during a sojourn in Venice. When read with the ancient Greek literature that served as Mann’s inspiration, however, the novella becomes a conversation across expanses of literary time. In this course, begin by reading two works that profoundly influenced Mann: Euripides’s tragedy, The Bacchae, and excerpts from Plato’s Phaedrus, before diving into Death in Venice.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9112 Dictatorship and Its Discontents Through the Lens of Latin American Literature (0 Credits)

Through most of the 19th and well into the 20th century, Latin America was home to dictators and strong men, frequently emerging from the army, who exerted complete control over their nations for long periods of time. In turn, such authoritarian regimes often were contested by dissident voices and even revolutionary movements. A variety of Latin American writers have given their personal versions of “dictatorship and its discontents,” either by directly examining specific rulers or more indirectly exploring the effects and consequences of their actions. This course focuses on the Latin American experience, but these texts provide a framework that can be profitably used to examine similar regimes in other parts of the world, regardless of time and location. Texts include Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, Miguel Ángel Asturias’s The President, Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat, Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch, and Marta Traba’s Mothers and Shadows.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9113 Shakespeare: King Lear and Twelfth Night (0 Credits)

Explore two of Shakespeare’s best-loved plays and the cultural forces that helped to shape them: Twelfth Night, his wickedly witty version of the Renaissance LGBT scene, in which shipwrecked twins, each thinking the other dead, embark on a series of romantic misadventures involving cross-dressing, dashing counts, obese alcoholics, and a perceptive fool who presides over the whole madcap affair; and King Lear, Shakespeare’s searing portrayal of redemption through suffering, which is widely considered his greatest tragedy.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9114 The Great Ones: Artists from the Kennedy Center Honors (0 Credits)

These artists from theatre, film, dance, comedy, and classical and popular music, all Kennedy Center Honorees, have thrilled and astonished audiences over the last 45 years. Learn more about the risk-taking artists who have reshaped their art forms, leaving an indelible mark on our spirits and our times. Experience the soaring cello of Yo-Yo Ma; the groundbreaking dance of Mikhail Baryshnikov and Alvin Ailey; the changing faces of screen heroes, including Bette Davis, Meryl Streep, Gregory Peck, and Robert De Niro; the music of songwriters who peer into the human heart, such as Stephen Sondheim, Johnny Cash, and Pete Seeger; and the glory of comic genius from the likes of Carol Burnett and Mel Brooks. All of these artists pushed themselves and their audiences, taking their art in new directions and enhancing our sense of life. Short films about the artists made for the Kennedy Center Honors and an optional reading list will be provided.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9115 Contemporary Irish Short Fiction (0 Credits)

Short stories are the emeralds in the crown of Irish literature. Following the footsteps of four Nobel Prize winners, George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney, this course will take the reins of these literary icons and explore Irish literature up to the present day. By examining great storytellers who transformed a celebrated oral tradition into a rich and lyrical prose style, we will focus on how contemporary Irish writers continue to distinguish themselves and their illustrious past. These stories weave a complex literary tapestry, complete with rebellious, controversial, cultural, political, and religious ramifications. Readings may include works by Maeve Brennan, Roddy Doyle, Mary Lavin, Colum McCann, William Trevor, and Colm Tóibín.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9116 The Best and Worst of Times: Charles Dickens's Historical Novels (0 Credits)

Charles Dickens produced two major historical novels that explore social issues persisting to our day. In Barnaby Rudge, Dickens depicts a right-wing populist rebellion in 1780 that highlights familiar and unexpected ethnic tensions within British national space, while also examining the impact of the English defeat in the American Revolution. In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens castigates the malevolence of the French monarchy and the overreached of the revolutionaries who overthrew it, all the while affirming that individuals can still make a difference within history. We will spend two weeks each on these major and still-provocative works.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9117 1985: Literature Goes Global (0 Credits)

1985 was a pivotal year in world literature—in many ways it could be described as the year literature went global. The impacts of the Reagan administration and of global free-market ideology began to be felt; magic realism, feminism, and postmodernism were entering the mainstream; the legacies of earlier traumas, such as World War II and the Vietnam War, were being reassessed; and once-marginalized regions in Eastern Europe and Latin America began to speak back to the world. This course will explore literature from the US, Canada, Colombia, Indonesia, the UK, and Australia that was written during this explosive and important year. Readings may include Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale; Don DeLillo, White Noise; Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera; Tahar Ben Jelloun, The Sand Child; Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit; Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Footsteps; Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist; Bobbie Ann Mason, In Country; and Peter Carey, Illywhacker.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9118 The New York City Novel: From Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence to Imbolo Mbue's Behold the Dream (0 Credits)

This course will consider five novels set in different eras in New York City. Through each of these novels—Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence; Amor Towles’s Rules of Civility; Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies, A Love Story; Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn; and Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers—we will encounter New York City at widely varying times through extremely differing lenses via the divergent experiences of diverse groups. These novels explore the city as not only a cultural haven and a cosmopolitan and urbane space but also a wild world in which rules don’t apply.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9121 Introduction to the New Testament (2 Credits)

Containing sacred writings of three major world religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—the Bible has influenced millennia of literature, art, and thought. Explore the New Testament in light of historical, sociological, and literary contexts, both ancient and contemporary. Classes are discussion-oriented and involve close analysis and interpretation of texts.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9122 On the Road: Literature in the Picaresque Tradition (0 Credits)

The picaresque genre, a potent combination of adventure and social critique, first appeared in 16th-century Spain and has continued to develop and expand ever since. Picaresque novels are often described as “road novels,” since they chronicle the episodic life of a pícaro, a rogue or rascal, who is always on the move. Resourceful and unscrupulous, the pícaro also is astutely observant of society’s flaws, contradictions, and corruption. If a pícara, a woman, she is not averse to using her body for survival and profit. Picaresque narratives offer eventful action and the lessons of experience, a close-up view of an individual’s soul, and a panoramic view of the surrounding social landscape. Readings include Two Spanish Picaresque Novels: Lazarillo de Tormes and The Swindler, Cervantes’ “Rinconete and Cortadillo,” von Grimmelshausen’s The Life of Courage, Voltaire’s Candide, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull, Kerouac’s On the Road, and Allende’s Eva Luna.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9124 Dancing to the Music of Time: The Novels of Anthony Powell (0 Credits)

Anthony Powell has been called the “English Proust” and “the greatest comic novelist since Dickens.” As the glowing reviews of Hilary Spurling’s recent biography of the author have noted, Powell is gaining recognition as one of the great British novelists of the past century, with a style The New York Times characterized as full of “irony, wit, and resonance.” We will read selected volumes of Powell’s masterpiece, the 12-novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time. With both lyrical depth and uproariously funny humor, Powell chronicles a generation of giddy-heads, bohemians, soldiers, cads, and dreamers who contend with all the changes that swept over the 20th century, especially the crisis of the Second World War. With an epic range as well as an intimate sensibility, this series will introduce us to many characters through the decades, foremost of which are the sensitive, meditative Jenkins, and the astonishing, legendary, and loathsome Widmerpool, one of the 20th century’s great villains.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9130 John Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga: Men and Women in the Edwardian Age (0 Credits)

John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga was significantly responsible for his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932, awarded for what the Swedish Academy termed his “distinguished art of narration.” But in addition to experimenting with nearly every modern technique, Galsworthy also represented an Edwardian era that only now is beginning to enjoy deserved appreciation. In telling the story of the bourgeois Forsytes and their slow exposure to the modern world, the author depicts a gallery of fascinating Edwardian characters, from the cruel to the compassionate, the stiff-upper-lip to the contemplative and questioning. The role of women and their emergence into full citizenship are a major theme, counterpointing the despicable Soames Forsyte, the “man of property” who is the epitome of malevolent, patriarchal self-centeredness, while at the same time the novel’s irresistible center. In this course, we will read the entire saga, comprising three books, The Man of Property, In Chancery, and To Let, and two short interludes.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9132 Three Recent Nobel Laureates from France; Le Clezio, Modiano, Ernaux (0 Credits)

Register for this Summer 2023 course on the new <a href="https://nyusps.gatherlearning.com/events/three-recent-nobel-laureates-from-france-le-clezio-modiano-ernaux">NYU SPS Academy of Lifelong Learning website</a>.   In the twenty-first century so far, three writers from France have been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. We will read J.M.G. Le Clézio, Patrick Modiano, and Annie Ernaux. We will explore Le Clézio’s lyrical renditions of cultural encounter and difference after colonialism; Modiano’s taut, suspenseful inquiries into the gaps and mysteries left by the Holocaust and the ravages of the twentieth century; and Ernaux’s frank, unfettered, yet highly literary explorations of her own experience. Between these three writers, we see many possible ramifications of the primal encounter between self and other. Readings include: Le Clézio, Desert; Modiano, In The Café of Lost Youth; and Ernaux, The Years and Simple Passion. Summer 2023 tuition is $349.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9143 Women Write Their Lives (0 Credits)

Read about the lives of some exceptional women writers through their memoirs and autobiographical essays. Discover the rich variety of their cultural backgrounds (English, French, West Indian, Italian, and American), their experiences, their styles of writing, and the ways in which they help us to identify and appreciate some of the central issues in women’s lives. Explore Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical essays (Moments of Being); Annie Ernaux’s discussions of social mobility and growing up Catholic in France (A Frozen Woman and A Woman’s Story); Jamaica Kincaid’s depiction of family, home, obligation, and choice (My Brother); reflections about work, love, loneliness, and the passage of time by Vivian Gornick (The Odd Woman and the City) and by Natalia Ginzburg (A Place to Live); Louise Glück’s writings about becoming a poet; Roz Chast’s graphic memoir about daughterhood (Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?); and essays about parenthood by Lorrie Moore (“People Like That Are the Only People Here”), about obsession by Katha Pollitt (“Webstalker”), and about contemporary life by Zadie Smith.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9144 The Modern Comic Novel (0 Credits)

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9145 Women Fiction Writers: From Charlotte Brontë to Lydia Davis (0 Credits)

Explore how women fiction writers, from Charlotte Brontë to Lydia Davis, portray a woman’s distinctive experiences, the workings of her mind, and her struggle to lead a full life. Discover how these authors depict the passage of time, family ties, relationships among friends, the complexity of the mother/daughter relationship, heartbreak, starting over in midlife, and the experiences and conflicts of everyday life. Read innovative novels, stories, and poems capturing the role of money, power, social convention, and cultural expectations in a wide range of social settings. Readings include Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea; Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John; Margaret Drabble, The Seven Sisters; Rachel Cusk, Transit; Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter; Lydia Davis, Almost No Memory; and Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay.”

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9168 Two Novels by Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment and the Brothers Karamazov (0 Credits)

Register for this Fall 2023 course on the new <a href="https://nyusps.gatherlearning.com/events/two-novels-by-fyodor-dostoevsky-crime-and-punishment-and-the-brothers-karamazov">NYU SPS Academy of Lifelong Learning website.</a>Dostoyevsky’s two most famous novels revealed a Russian society riven morally and politically and aflame with the passions of a frustrated modernity. Dostoyevsky was of several minds about many things, and his novels masterfully display this ambivalence as they explore the conventions of love, greed, and revolution. But they also reveal the novelist’s unparalleled grasp of psychological subtlety and expertly capture his characters’ feelings of fear, guilt, joy, and salvation. Reading the recent, acclaimed translations by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, we will see how novels immersed in the context of one hundred and fifty years ago are still resonant in the vital present.  Fall 2023 tuition is $499. Registering at least three weeks prior to the course start date is highly recommended.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9169 James Joyce's Ulysses (0 Credits)

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9255 Parallel Lives: George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (0 Credits)

Daniel Deronda was the last novel that George Eliot completed before her death in 1780, a work which most nearly approaches the level of her masterpiece, Middlemarch. Daniel Deronda is a young man of uncertain parentage, who grows up in an aristocratic milieu. Just as he has decided on one life course, he discovers his Jewish identity and becomes captivated by the implications that this suggests. Daniel’s story is paralleled by that of Gwendolen Harleth, who makes a disastrous marriage with a sadistic older man and has to deal with its consequences. In these two contrasting stories of young people searching for meaning, love, and purpose, we see a great novelist at the peak of her powers

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9256 Reading Dante's Paradise (0 Credits)

Join us for the final leg of our favorite pilgrim’s trip through the afterlife’s three realms. We bid adieu to Virgil and enter Paradise, as Dante completes his personal journey to spiritual salvation. Ideally, students will have read Purgatory prior to the start of the course, but there will be a recap/summary for those who are starting here.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9263 From Page to Stage: Great Irish Playwrights of the 20th Century (0 Credits)

From the founding of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre by William Butler Yeats and others at the turn of the century, Irish playwrights left an indelible mark on theatre history of the 20th century. With political and social themes providing a unique backdrop to the drama, these writers set human behavior against Ireland’s tumultuous historic and cultural past—and unforgettable theatre has been the result. Course readings include works by J. M. Synge, Sean O’Casey, Brendan Behan, Sebastian Barry, Enda Walsh, and Martin McDonagh.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9270 The Novel Today (Spring) (0 Credits)

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9275 The Art of Storytelling (0 Credits)

Although we’re often not entirely conscious of the nature of a book’s narrator, he or she is a crucial character and part of the book’s structure. Explore this important aspect of storytelling in this course that focuses on the various roles played by the storyteller. Some narrators are distant and removed; others seem so close to their subjects that the reader cannot trust their objectivity. Others change perspective as the book proceeds. Explore a range of narrators and the nature of their roles—whether all-seeing guide, multiple commentator, ironic judge, or voyeur. Texts discussed include Wuthering Heights, The Remains of the Day, The Things They Carried, and Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9290 The Importance of Reading Wilde (0 Credits)

From great exuberance and humor to the depths of despair, Oscar Wilde’s works often followed the contours of his life. Though Wilde was a master of late Victorian drama and comedy––who also wrote poetry, children’s stories, essays, epigrams, literary criticism and a novel––public opinion about the writer’s life often overshadowed his writing. In this course, we sample all of these genres, getting to know Wilde as a wit and dandy and as an art critic and socialist. Discuss how the reception of his work changed between the late 19th century and the present. <st1:place style="font-size: 10pt; "><st1:city>Readings</st1:city></st1:place> include The Importance of Being Earnest, Portrait of Dorian Gray, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, excerpts from his letters and essays, and parts of his biography and famous trial for homosexuality.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9293 Images of Women: In Marriage and Divorce (0 Credits)

Read novels and poems by extraordinary women writers exploring different dimensions of marriage and divorce. What are the consequences of social class, social convention and money on choosing and being chosen? On leaving and being left? On motherhood? How do these social forces interact with desire, jealousy, ambition, self-knowledge and self-delusion? What is the role of luck, of chance? How do women act in the face of this complexity? We read two novels by Edith Wharton, whose two remarkable and very different characters, Lily Bart and Undine Sprague, try to make their way in the world through marriage (The House of Mirth; The Custom of the Country); Virginia Woolf’s creation of the married Clarissa Dalloway reflecting on her life’s choices (Mrs. Dalloway); Elena Ferrante’s depiction of Olga’s crisis as she tries to deal with the shock of being abandoned by her husband (The Days of Abandonment); and poems by Sharon Olds in which she reflects, after time has passed, on her husband’s departure (Stag’s Leap).

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9294 Images of Women (0 Credits)

Explore how women writers, from Edith Wharton to Elena Ferrante, have created rich, complex, varied portraits of women. Discover how these authors—in novels, memoirs, stories, and poems—write about women facing constraining social conventions and difficult personal choices—women in transitions, in crises, in conflict. Read about women living in different times and places and their dilemmas in love, marriage, family, and work, as well as their methods for coping with powerful social forces. Readings include Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country; Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway; Annie Ernaux, Happening; Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment; Louise Glück, Ararat; Sharon Olds, The Dead and the Living; and Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9305 Brilliant Minds (0 Credits)

Literary genius can take innumerable shapes and forms through novels, plays, and poetry. Brilliant minds use their gifts to entertain, inspire, engage, and enlighten about philosophical and artistic concerns, social trappings, and human conceit. This course examines a selection of great minds each semester through a curated reading list that illuminates the particular brilliance of each individual featured author.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9310 Reading Homer's Odyssey: Voyage of Self-Discovery (2 Credits)

Homer’s Odyssey is not merely an adventure story. It is a universal saga of personal growth which poses this (among many) questions: As one progresses through life, which is more important—living an exciting (but possibly dangerous) life, or settling down peacefully (or possibly tediously) at home? It has been said that every aspect of the Odyssey is a metaphor for the challenges we face as we navigate through the years: our fears, our desires, our loves, our legacy. In this 5-week course, we will analyze Odysseus as the universal lover and warrior, filled with hope and despair, resilience and PTSD, who emerges from a 10-year war and another 10 years on the high seas resolved to return home to Ithaca and his wife–at any cost. Summer 2024 tuition is $419.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9316 Autofiction in the 21st Century: From Ferrante to Knausgaard (0 Credits)

This course will examine the phenomenon of autofiction, a recent literary trend in which the author appears as a character and the reader experiences the novel as a space between fiction and fact. We will examine autofiction’s cultural and psychological implications, as well as its origins. These books will take us from a corporate workplace in Japan to a high school in Kansas to the home of a Harlem preacher. Readings will include James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain; Héctor Abad Faciolince, Oblivion; Elena Ferrante, The Lying Life of Adults; Rachel Cusk, Outline; Alex Miller, The Passage of Love; Amélie Nothomb, Fear and Trembling; Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous; Ben Lerner, The Topeka School; Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation; and Karl Ove Knausgaard, Autumn.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9321 Mothers and Daughters in Contemporary Literature (0 Credits)

After looking at the myth of Demeter and Persephone, explore the mother/daughter relationship through a range of modern literary texts written from both perspectives––including poems by Louise Glück, Adrienne Rich, Maxine Kumin, and Eavan Boland; Jamaica Kincaid’s novel about growing up, Annie John; Edna O’Brien’s novel about the passions among three generations of women, The Light of Evening; Vivian Gornick’s memoir about the difficulties of separation, Fierce Attachments; and descriptions of conflict, love, loss, and the passage of time in memoirs by Faith Ringgold and Kate Simon, and in stories by Alice Munro and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9322 Leo Tolstoy: The Hero is Truth (0 Credits)

This course will study five works of fiction by a giant of world literature. We will explore his identity as a social reformer, moral thinker, and a novelist with deep insight into the human character, families, war, peace, love, passion, and (especially) truth, something Tolstoy suggested was always the true hero of his stories. We will discuss his two masterpieces of realist fiction that led to his reputation as creating not simply works of art, but “pieces of life,” and which led Isaak Babel to comment that, if the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy.  His two greatest novels will  feature one of literature’s most passionate and tragic romances, families unhappy each in their own way, peasants, aristocrats, generals, the drawing rooms of St Petersburg, the killing fields of Borodino, everyday people and Napoleon himself, and will explore philosophical issues such as chance, fate, freedom, coincidence, predestination, and spiritual transformation. We will also read his third and final novel that explores Tolstoy as he was best known in his time—as a sage and social thinker who inspired such leaders as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King as well as today’s champions of human rights. Readings include War and Peace (two sessions) Anna Karenina (two sessions), and Resurrection  (guest lecture by Professor Nicholas Birns).  Students should read War and Peace, Volumes One and Two, for the first class.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9325 Plays with a Social Conscience (0 Credits)

Examine how eight well-known playwrights brought moving, memorable stories to the stage and illuminated the injustices evident in cultures and communities. Issues of gender, race, and class receive special focus through examinations of Awake and Sing! by Clifford Odets, The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers, Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, Athol Fugard’s Blood Knot, August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Diana Son’s Stop Kiss, Lynn Nottage’s Sweat, and Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me. Active participation in class discussion is encouraged. Please read Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing! prior to the first class.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9334 Modern and Contemporary South Asian Fiction (0 Credits)

South Asian fiction has made a major contribution to world literature of our time. In this course, we will read 20th- and 21st-century fiction from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh, including Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero; Mohammed Hanif, A Case of Exploding Mangoes; Aravind Adiga, Amnesty; Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss; Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, The Householder; R. K. Narayan, The Guide; Perumal Murugan, One Part Woman; Monica Ali, Brick Lane; and Michelle de Kretser, Questions of Travel. These writers chronicle decolonization and diaspora; communal, caste, and religious rivalries; and the fall of governments and rise of social movements, demonstrating the uses of the novelistic form in depicting individual destinies and a vast, heterogeneous territory.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9335 Historical Fiction (0 Credits)

Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane told the harrowing stories of American Civil War soldiers in works such as The Horseman in the Sky, The Affair at Coulter's Notch, and The Red Badge of Courage. Willa Cather's Death Comes to the Archibishop chronicles life in mid-19th-century New Mexico. William Thackeray's Vanity Fair serves as a biting satire of 19th-century British society. Through these works and others, explore historic events and analyze how works of fiction have the power to illuminate history and bring it to life.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9340 Eugene O'Neill: A Confluence of Irish and American Roots (0 Credits)

Eugene O’Neill’s plays do not deal with traditional American dramatic themes of optimism, farce, and melodrama. Instead, they explore pessimism and inner tragedy. The son of Irish immigrants, O’Neill inherited these genes from his ancestors and their long tradition of lyrical storytelling. Explore O’Neill’s personal life, his contemporaries in American theater, and the influence that his Irish heritage had on his reception and legacy as an international icon. Plays discussed include Desire Under the Elms, Mourning Becomes Electra, The Iceman Cometh, A Moon for the Misbegotten, and Long Day’s Journey into Night.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9401 Pulp Fiction and Film Noir: American Popular Culture (1.5 Credits)

While ostensibly lurid, cheaply produced, and designed to arouse, “pulp” entertainment, both in literature and film, also reveals the essence of modern American popular culture—sex, shock, and violence. Read classics of the genre such as Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, as well as contemporary best sellers like Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, and explore its most famous tropes—dames and thugs, femme fatales and corrupt police—and overwrought morals. Decipher cultural clues via literature, film, psychology, history, and myth. Films include trashy gems such as Chinatown and, of course, Pulp Fiction.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9402 Unlocking Shakespeare, Part 3 (2 Credits)

Explore a rich variety of Shakespeare’s plays and the cultural forces that helped to shape them. Works covered include Twelfth Night, the most profound of Shakespeare’s so-called “golden comedies,” in which a girl disguised as a boy falls for a man who thinks her a male; Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s most famous “Roman” play, with its covertly politicized depiction of mob rule; and King Lear, arguably Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy and his consummate portrayal of redemption through suffering. By the end of the course, understand Shakespeare’s language in both its literary and cultural contexts and have the resources to enjoy Shakespeare on your own.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9403 Modernism and Race (0 Credits)

This course will consider the ways in which high modernism, which appeared in the interwar period, was shaped by the Victorian and Edwardian obsession over “racial hygiene,” as articulated by biologists, anthropologists, and philologists promoting degeneration theory, eugenics, and scientific racism. In this course, we will read modernist works alongside critical texts to examine both the embrace and rejection of racial theories in modernist literature. Readings will include T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and his unfinished “blackface” play Effie the Waif; sections from Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos and Guide to Kulchur; excerpts from James Joyce’s novels and his essays on the Irish race; Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood; Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse; and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, alongside the anti-racist and anti-colonial texts that he translated for Nancy Cunard’s Negro: An Anthology.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9404 Shakespeare's Histories: Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, and Henry V (0 Credits)

Explore this epic cycle of Shakespeare’s plays—Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, and Henry V—and the cultural forces that helped to shape them. Together they trace the turbulence that roils the British kingdom under three successive rulers: Richard II, whose disastrous rule and cavalier perversion of justice plunge his realm into faction and revolt; Henry IV, Richard’s murderer, whose ruthlessness and efficiency cannot save him from the mounting troubles that curse his reign and dog him to his grave; and Henry V, Henry’s wayward son. These plays trace the influence of these kings on England’s history and ponder issues still very relevant today: the ethics of invading a sovereign nation, the effects of illicitly gained power, and the loneliness of political rulership.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9414 Introduction to the Hebrew Bible: Poetry to Apocalypse (0 Credits)

Containing the sacred writings of two of the major world religions, the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) has influenced centuries of literature, art, and thought. This course, the third part of Introduction to the Old Testament, treats the historical, sociological, and literary contexts—both ancient and contemporary—in which the books of the Hebrew Bible emerged and its role as canonical scripture in Judaism and Christianity. This course focuses on the “writings,” the last part of the Hebrew Bible. Classes are discussion-oriented and involve close analysis and interpretation of texts.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9415 The Bible and Human Sexuality: Sin and Sex (0 Credits)

Sexual orientation, sexual practices, and what society deems “appropriate” and “inappropriate” sexual behavior have been hot button issues since biblical times. This was especially true in the Ancient Near East, where power lay in the hands of heterosexual males and their preferences and behaviors were reflected in the laws of the time. Examine sexual relationships—sensual, sordid, and sublime—in the Bible and in the ancient world, including the roots of gender roles, power, forbidden sexuality, and consequences for deviation. Read biblical texts that deal with sexuality and sin, as well as writings that discuss life in biblical times.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9600 Shakespearean Controversies: The Merchant of Venice and The Taming of the Shrew (0 Credits)

Explore two controversial masterpieces and the cultural forces that helped shape them: The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare’s troubling pre-political correctness work about the place of Jews in Renaissance Venice, and The Taming of the Shrew, his wry commentary on 16th-century women’s lib. Is Merchant anti-Semitic, as is widely alleged? This interpretation has been exploited by anti-Semites throughout the play’s history, including the Nazis who used Merchant’s propaganda potential to buttress their anti-Jewish agenda. Or is it, as others argue, a plea for tolerance? Does Shrew really champion violence to tame an unruly wife? Or does it advocate female supremacy through pretended wifely submission?

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9602 Walk on the Wild Side: Music, Poetry, and Theatre of the 1970s (0 Credits)

New York City in the 1970s has been enshrined in the collective memory as a decade of upheaval, tumult, and urban decay; however, it also was a time of tremendous creativity. Although crime and drug use were rampant, a sense of raw culture percolated up from the streets, providing some of the most controversial and provocative art and music of the century. The ’70s gave us music like punk (Patti Smith, New York Dolls, The Ramones) and hip-hop (DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash) that pushed artistic and social boundaries. New York of the ’70s gave us the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, home to groundbreaking works of multicultural poetry, music, theatre, and visual arts (Ntozake Shange and Miguel Piñero). Immerse yourself in the art of the “me decade” while exploring the ways that this period of unrest and protest continues to influence creativity and culture today. As part of the course, we will take a guided tour of some ’70s New York’s hotspots.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9631 Love, War, Peaceful Ending: Reading Homer's Iliad (0 Credits)

Re-live – or experience for the first time – the wrath of Achilles and its fatal consequences.  In ten sessions, we will explore Homer’s genius as an oral bard through in-depth discussions of the Iliad, a glorification of the heroic ideal that is ultimately an eloquent plea for peace.  We will trace the causes behind Achilles’ grudge and examine the pride, loss, and isolation experienced by this definitive Homeric hero, who matures enough to perform the ultimate act of kindness. Questions? Contact us at The Center for Applied Liberal Arts (CALA). Email sps.cala@nyu.edu or call 212-998-7289.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9633 Detective Partners in Literature (0 Credits)

Despite Raymond Chandler’s famous claim that “a really good detective never gets married,” literary partners from Holmes and Watson to Nick and Nora Charles to Lou Norton and Colin Taggert have gained devoted readership by proving Ernest Hemingway’s more colorful conviction: “No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody f**king chance.” Be it spouse, chronicler, sidekick, or complementary counterpart, the detective partner enriches narrative technique and deepens characterization in mystery fiction. Whether the appeal lies in similarity, as in the cozy quintessential Englishness of Holmes and Watson, or in the seemingly endless and sometimes uneasy combinations of differences in personality, gender, race, religion, sexual preference, economic class, or even species, the detective partnership itself holds a fascination as strong as the mysteries they solve. Join us to read and discuss a wide sampling of classic and contemporary detective partnerships by Dashiell Hammett, Rex Stout, Elizabeth George, Val McDermid, Tony Hillerman, Rachel Howzell Hall, and others.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9642 The Novels of Joseph Conrad: A Glimpse of Truth (0 Credits)

Joseph Conrad was born a Polish aristocrat in what is now Ukraine. He spent his formative years as a merchant seaman in the Caribbean, the Atlantic, and the Far East. He went on to become one of the greatest English prose stylists of the 20th century. Conrad’s novels have a complex ethical vision, along with the pulse of a writer who had deep experiences across many facets of life. He sought to give his reader “that glimpse of truth” for which they have “forgotten to ask.” In his greatest novels, Nostromo and Victory, Conrad examines how imperialism, capitalism, desire, and mystery intersect amid the contradictions of modernity. We will read these novels in tandem with Maya Jasanoff’s recent book, The Dawn Watch, which situates Conrad’s life at the heart of the development of a new global world.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9704 Detective Narratives: Women Who Sleuth (0 Credits)

Fans of the detective genre are well acquainted with Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Jessica Fletcher of Murder She Wrote, but they may not know Anna Katharine Green’s Amelia Butterworth, the first female detective in American fiction. The success of these respectable and seemingly conventional ladies as detectives lies in their powers of observation and their unthreatening demeanors, giving them the appearance of little in common with more recent characters, like Lisbeth Salander astride her motorcycle in pursuit of vigilante justice. Yet contemporary female sleuths, such as Salander, Kinsey Millhone, or Sookie Stackhouse, are linked to their classic predecessors by the shared qualities of determination, razor sharp memory, and a certain knack for turning their adversary’s stereotypical expectations to their own advantage. Come hone your own powers of observation, memory, determination, and resistance to tiresome expectations as we explore the origins and special appeal of the literary woman detective. We will read selected novels, ranging from the 19th century to the present, by authors of all genders and nationalities, and representing multiple categories of detective narratives, including the amateur detective, the hardboiled PI, and the police procedural. You’ll sample reviews and literary criticism, participate in lively discussion, and leave with a reading list that will help you to carry your own investigations into this genre far into the future.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9705 Reading Shakespeare: King Lear and Twelfth Night (0 Credits)

Explore two of Shakespeare’s best-loved plays and the cultural forces that helped to shape them: King Lear, Shakespeare’s consummate portrayal of redemption through suffering, which is widely considered his greatest work, and Twelfth Night, his wickedly witty version of the Renaissance gay-lesbian-trans scene, in which a girl disguised as a boy falls for a man who thinks she’s a male.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9713 Do Not Say We Have Nothing: The Literature of Migrants and Refugees (0 Credits)

Writing by migrants and refugees—people forced to be on the move, whether by government oppression or social turbulence—has challenged customary national conceptions of literature. Read major works in this fascinating and emerging genre produced by contemporary migrants and refugees from Europe, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. These rich and compelling stories demonstrate how the human spirit can persevere in the most tragic and ruinous circumstances. They illumine the multiplicity and diversity of the modern world while throwing light on those who seek to challenge diversity. Readings may include Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone; Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears; Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing; Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory; W. G. Seabed’s Austerlitz; Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains; Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Leaving Tangier; Felicity Castagna’s No More Boats; Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; and Alina Bronsky’s Broken Glass Park. Students should read Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone prior to first class.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9714 Interwar Breakpoint: 1929 in World Literature (2 Credits)

The year 1929 was a turning point in the world of literature. It was the year in which the impact of the First World War fully made itself felt in literature, in which high modernism fully emerged as a form that could measure the full depth of the human character, and in which the Great Depression began and the first shadows of the Second World War began to appear. In this course devoted exclusively to 1929, we will read works from Argentina to Japan, from the detective story to the historical novel, from courtly mansions to the factory floor—works that above all ask what it is to be modern and alive. Readings may include Roberto Arlt, The Seven Madmen; Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September; William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury; Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest; Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front; Nella Larsen, Passing; and Junichiro Tanizaki, Some Prefer Nettles.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9723 Pots and Pens: Writing Women in Latin America (0 Credits)

Read and discuss selected works by Latin American female writers that display their high artistic achievement, as well as their sustained engagement with women-centered issues and concerns. We will pay special attention to how these writers often use the domestic space as a springboard for literary creativity, thus challenging traditional boundaries imposed by gender and custom. They succeed in making “the other voice”—a woman’s voice—heard within the confines of a repressive, highly patriarchal environment. Writers to be discussed may include María Luisa Bombal (Chile), Rosario Castellanos (Mexico), Clarice Lispector (Brazil), Laura Esquivel (Mexico), Luisa Valenzuela (Argentina), Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay), Rosario Ferré (Puerto Rico), Isabel Allende (Chile), Carmen Boullosa (Mexico), Laura Restrepo (Colombia), and a variety of poets. All literature will be read in English.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9727 Ancient Greek Tragedy: The First Family (0 Credits)

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9729 Edgar Allan Poe: His Shadow Lives on Evermore (1.5 Credits)

Edgar Allan Poe led a dissolute, poverty-stricken life of gambling and drinking. Yet his writing talents impressed the literary world of Europe long before he was finally accepted into the pantheon of great American writers. His reputation began while he was still alive (“The Raven”) and remains strong to this day in the worlds of literature, visual art, and music. He was the originator and innovator of several literary genres, including science fiction, the psychological horror thriller, the supernatural, and of course, the detective story (as in, for instance, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”). His legacy has influenced and continues to influence many authors, from Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie to Raymond Chandler and Jorge Luis Borges. This course will trace Poe’s unsettling biographical roots and itinerant career path as a journalist, short story writer, poet, and critic from Boston to Baltimore. Readings will include his tales of mystery and imagination, his poetry, and works by authors from the 19th century to the present whom he influenced. Required text: The Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (UK: Wordsworth Editions, 2004) or any other edition of Poe’s collected works.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9733 Podcasts: Short Stories to Go (1.5 Credits)

Humans have been telling stories and folk tales to each other for millennia. From the edge of the campfire to the paperback book, stories have forged our identity as social creatures. Now in the 21st century, with less spare time and advancing technology, storytelling has expanded to the digital arena through podcasting. A podcast might best be described as Internet radio on-demand—users download audio files to a smartphone, iPod, tablet, or computer to listen to stories on the go. From true crime investigations to serialized short stories, interviews to modern folk tales, podcasts are not beholden to one genre. In this course, sample podcasts from The New Yorker, Fresh Air (NPR), and The Guardian, as well as weird tales from Welcome to Night Vale, modern folk stories from The Moth, and episodes from The New York Times’ Modern Love and Selected Shorts. Discuss what happens when a story transforms into an audible experience, and explore the many advantages of this emerging format. The first session will include a guided orientation into what a podcast is and the simplest way of downloading and playing these audio files on your device.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9800 Why Paris? (0 Credits)

To many, Paris is synonymous with sophistication, haute couture, and adventure. But Paris has never been all romance. From the Nazi occupation to the tragic and shocking terrorist attacks of 2015, the history of Paris has also been gritty, tragic, and all too real. In this course, read both classic and contemporary works of French literature in translation to examine how Paris serves as an international symbol of freedom to some while representing terrible oppression and racism to others. We examine a variety of literature, including Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Émile Zola’s Nana, Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins, Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, Faïza Guène’s Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow, and the work of Patrick Modiano—the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature. The course will conclude with a discussion about the ferment in contemporary France and works that reflect emerging new voices.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9801 Novels for a Changing America: From The Great Gatsby to Bright Lights, Big City (0 Credits)

With settings that range from the saloons of the Old West to the nightclubs of gentrified New York City, the 10 short novels we will read in this course voice the aspirations of American society and register the diversity of the American experience. They survey the pressures of growing up, the challenges of social inequality and class hierarchy, and the acceleration and excitement of modern life. They also show the evolution of the novel from a medium of mere entertainment to a vehicle of complex and moving narrative aesthetics. Readings will include Frank Norris, McTeague; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Willa Cather, Lucy Gayheart; Glenway Wescott, The Pilgrim Hawk; J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye; James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room; José Antonio Villarreal, Pocho; Dawn Powell, The Golden Spur; Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City; and Louise Erdrich, Tracks.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9920 Agatha Christie (0 Credits)

Known as the Queen of Crime and the Mistress of Mystery, Agatha Christie is the world’s best-known mystery writer. Her work has been outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Recently, she also has earned a reputation as a significant literary artist and is receiving serious attention by scholars, literary critics, social critics, and even scientists, who have noted that her language patterns stimulate higher-than-usual activity in the brain. In discussing her classic mysteries, we will examine the considerable uncertainty and disorder underneath her seemingly cozy worlds, which far from remaining conservative enclaves, address modern times and modern problems. We also will explore themes of illusion and truth, appearance and reality, and criminal psychology, as well as Christie’s highly inventive narrative strategies. Readings will feature diabolically clever criminals as well as her great detectives, including her two major sleuths, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Readings will include The Murder at the Vicarage, Murder on the Orient Express, The A.B.C. Murders, Towards Zero, At Bertram’s Hotel, and And Then There Were None. Please read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd prior to the first class.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9921 From Ellison to Nguyen: Exploring Multicultural America (0 Credits)

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is one of the greatest 20th-century novels, one which placed the African American experience at the very center of American and world literature. We will study this masterpiece in conjunction with two more recent works that respond to and comment on Invisible Man: Toni Morrison’s Paradise and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer. These acclaimed books of epic scope and astonishing innovation have much in common, pairing social critique with ambivalent reflection, and desire for community with an awareness of the need for individuality and dissidence. In critiquing racism and exclusion in the United States, these writers also construct an active literary tradition that is still ongoing.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9922 Boccaccio's Decameron (0 Credits)

This course will examine Boccaccio’s late-medieval masterpiece, a series of 100 tales told within the frame story of a group of 10 young people who take refuge in a country home, after fleeing plague-ridden Florence. The relevance in this unique historical moment is clear, and the stories provide an overview of the author’s sentiments on morality, human resilience, and society.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9923 The Gothic Heroine (0 Credits)

Classic gothic heroines like Catherine Earnshaw or Mina Harker are among the most widely recognized and frequently adapted literary characters of all time. Emerging in the late 18th century and persistently popular in our own time, gothic heroines from Emily St. Aubert to Bella Swan came of age along with feminism. Do these sensational romantic bestsellers work to challenge or to reinforce gender stereotypes? Do they build or bust myths of happily ever after and having it all? As they recycle gothic conventions, these narratives rewrite our definition of heroism and illuminate a great deal about our fantasies and fears. We will analyze these thrilling, infuriating, irresistible portrayals, asking whether heroines from the past two centuries can show us, to paraphrase Jane Austen, how to be the heroes of our own lives.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9924 Reading Dante's Inferno (1.5 Credits)

Join us for a journey through Hell—Dante’s Inferno—a world in which a fascinating cast of characters, condemned to eternal punishment for sins committed on earth, recount their stories to the poet as he makes his pilgrimage through the underworld. In this first canticle of the Divine Comedy, readers encounter condemned lovers, corrupt popes and politicians, thieves, pagans, and a variety of other sinners. Using a reader-friendly translation, we will examine the Inferno’s key themes, the text’s overall message, and its place in cultural and literary history. The course also may include a trip to the Italian Cultural Institute, NYU’s Casa Italiana, or The Morgan Library.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9925 Banned in the USA: Freedom of Expression and the Literary Canon (0 Credits)

Register for this Fall 2022 course on the new <a href="https://nyusps.gatherlearning.com/events/banned-in-the-usa-freedom-of-expression-and-the-literary-canon">NYU SPS Academy of Lifelong Learning </a>website. Book banning has become a frequently used weapon in the culture wars in the United States and beyond. Both formal and informal censorship of books is a growing social problem. Most of our discussion about books in literary contexts presumes a public sphere in which there is freedom of expression. This is something which is increasingly imperiled. In the past, as the information scientist Herbert N. Foerstel has put it, books were censored in America more out of "social consensus” than because of “state or church power.” However, this is changing with state boards of education becoming increasingly more active in banning books. We will read ten of the most banned books of our era, discussing why they are controversial and what it means to ban them. We will also explore the way censorship perversely creates its own canon and how privileging literature is a contested category of cultural expression. <meta charset="utf-8" />Books for discussion include: The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood; The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison; Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury; To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee; The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas; Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, Jung Chang; Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel; The Awakening, Kate Chopin; The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini. Fall 2022 tuition is $599.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9928 Reading Dante's Purgatory (0 Credits)

Now that we have survived a trip through Hell, join us for this second part of Dante’s formative journey through the three realms of the afterlife. Purgatory will take us through seven levels of penitence and spiritual growth, reflected in the sinners’ expiation of the seven deadly sins. As we climb, we will encounter Dante’s reflections on the nature of sin, as well as examples of vice and virtue and of morality and amorality in the church and government. Ideally, students will have read the Inferno prior to the start of the course, but there will be a recap/summary for those who are starting here. Students will need Purgatory, Dante Alighieri, edited and translated by Robert M. Durling, Oxford University Press (ISBN 9780195087451).

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9931 Inspired by Real Life: Reading and Writing Exofiction in French (0 Credits)

Register for this Fall 2022 course on the new <a href="https://nyusps.gatherlearning.com/events/inspired-by-real-life-reading-and-writing-exofiction-in-french">NYU SPS Academy of Lifelong Learning</a> website. Explore French exofiction—a new literary phenomenon similar to biopics that takes inspiration from real-life events—and other 21st-century French novels. This online course is designed for individuals who possess high-intermediate or advanced French language ability. Examine French fiction by award-winning writers including Éric Vuillard, Leïla Slimani, Estelle-Sarah Bulle, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Yann Moix, Guillaume Le Touze, Rémi David. Every week, you will be provided with very short excerpts from these novels and you will submit your own short piece of fiction in French. Fall 2022 tuition is $699.   Note: Course content changes every semester, so this course may be taken more than once. Registering at least two weeks prior to the course start date is highly recommended.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9932 "Women of Mystery": Christie, Sayers, Highsmith, and French (0 Credits)

Read novels by three women who are in the mystery writers’ hall of fame and a current author who has been praised as “one of the greatest crime novelists writing today.” We will discuss a classic Hercule Poirot case set in Egypt; a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery considered one of the highest among her masterpieces, featuring free love and a dubious omelet; a tale of the dark side of a utopian American suburb by one of the greatest “noir” mystery writers; and a new cosmopolitan American writer who specializes in Dublin Murders. Readings will be Agatha Christie, Death on the Nile; Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison; Patricia Highsmith, Deep Water; and Tana French, In the Woods. Students should read Death on the Nile for the first class.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9933 Late Dickens: Passion and Mystery (0 Credits)

This course will examine Charles Dickens’s last three novels: Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, and the incomplete The Mystery of Edwin Drood. In his final years, at the height of his fame yet in the most troubled period of his personal life, Dickens at once became more symbolic and poetic in his style and conception of the novel form, while accentuating his tendency toward social critique. From Pip’s ardent pursuit of Estella in Great Expectations to Lizzie Hexam’s self-sacrifice on behalf of her brother in Our Mutual Friend to John Jasper’s tormented passion for Rosa Bud in Edwin Drood, these novels situate individual passions in a complex social matrix, providing a fitting capstone to Dickens’s storied career.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9940 Afrofuturism (0 Credits)

Since the premiere of the Marvel blockbuster Black Panther in 2018, the genre of afrofuturism or Black science fiction has become an integral part of mainstream American popular culture and public intellectual debate. But what is it that sets afrofuturism apart from other American science fiction? And why is afrofuturism particularly popular and powerful in the 21st century? Learn about the long history of afrofuturism and Black science fiction and their relevance to today’s popular culture. We will watch and discuss movies such as Black Panther (2018), Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and Us (2019), Spike Lee’s See You Yesterday (2019), Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country TV series (2020), and short stories by the two giants of afrofuturist literature: Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9941 Reading the World: Selections from Today's Newsstand (0 Credits)

Much of today’s best writing is published in magazines. From The New Yorker to the London Review of Books, the best investigative reporting, profiles, science journalism, and cultural criticism can be found on newsstands or online platforms. Each week, these periodicals illuminate our world with cutting-edge viewpoints by top-notch journalists and bestselling authors. In this course, each class session will focus on one topic, such as free speech, artificial intelligence, and the post-truth world, and will offer differing opinions from a variety of sources. Current events and participants’ interests guide our choices, so each week will be different. The instructor will provide all articles to be discussed, so no subscriptions are necessary. Coffee is provided, too. Just bring your best views of the world.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9950 Eyes on the Prize: Pulitzer Prize-Winning Plays of the 21st Century (0 Credits)

What do gentrifying hipsters from Chicago have in common with hard-drinking Oklahomans? Not much … except that they all are characters from plays that have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama since 2001. In this course, read and discuss recent plays that have won playwriting’s top prize, including modern classics such as Proof, Doubt, Topdog/Underdog, and August: Osage County. Featuring a dizzying range of topics like marital infidelity, substance abuse, and poisonous family arguments (and that’s just the first act of August: Osage County), these plays show us what America looks like in the beginning of the new century. Over the course of several weeks, we will read a different Pulitzer Prize-winning play and discuss what each has to say about where and who we are as a nation. Finally, as a class, we will attend a revival of a Pulitzer-winning play or perhaps the 2017 winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9951 Lover or Fighter? Reading Virgil's Aeneid (0 Credits)

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9952 Introduction to Contemporary Arab Literature (2 Credits)

Read contemporary prose from the Arab world with an eye for discerning which narratives reflect shared human experience and which are rooted in culture. Work toward recognizing the people who inhabit this world as actors in their own lives, and notice the ways in which all cultures are in flux. Examine recent trends in contemporary Arabic fiction, and look for insights into the discontent and desires of the people in this region.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9953 The Legacy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez: From Roberto Bolano to Valeria Luiselli (0 Credits)

Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, put the literature of Latin America on the world map. In this course, we will look at the literature produced in its wake. We will examine García Márquez’s later work, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, set in rural Colombia; The Feast of the Goat, by his great contemporary, Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa; and The Savage Detectives by their successor as the leading novelist of the region, Chilean-Mexican Roberto Bolaño, who is known for his acrid, dark, yet idealistic visions. We then will read works by the currently rising generation, which will take us into a contemporary world of drug cartels, pop culture, and rapid social transformation: The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez of Colombia; Heavens on Earth by Carmen Boullosa of Mexico; Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli of Mexico; Adiós Hemingway by Leonardo Padura Fuentes of Cuba; and Mouthful of Birds by Samantha Schweblin of Argentina.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9954 The Fiction of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Diaspora (0 Credits)

Since ancient times, when Euripides set Iphigenia in Tauris in the Crimean peninsula, the land that is now Ukraine has been at the center of the European imagination. We will read authors from the region writing in Ukrainian, Russian, French, Portuguese and Hebrew who testify to the multicultural identity of Ukraine–from the wry humor of Nikolai Gogol to the psychological intimacy of Mikhail Bulgakov, the incantatory elegy of Aharon Appelfeld to the dark surrealism of Andrei Kurkov, the inward journeys of Clarice Lispector and the social chronicle of Irene Nemirovsky. These Ukrainian writers have explored what it means to be both attached to the land and to derive new possibility from the rootlessness of exile; to be gentile or Jewish; to render imaginative experience in creative and aesthetic terms; to witness the impact of a tragic and conflicted history that continues to this day. Readings include. Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls; Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard; Irene Nemirovsky, Fire In The Blood, Aharon Appelfeld, Blooms In Darkness; Lispector, The Hour Of the Star; Andrei Kurkov, Death and the Penguin; Oksana Zabuzhko, Field Work in Ukranian Sex.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9955 The American Novel Today (0 Credits)

Discuss major new work by today’s top American writers, including emerging novelists, award winners, and established favorites, all who are central to today’s cultural conversation. Course readings will feature the challenge of parenting two fiery children in Tennessee; the amazing alliance of a schemer and a dreamer in a brutal Florida reform school; a thriller involving a toddler, a baby, an intruder, and a stressed-out modern mother; a reunion at Martha’s Vineyard that tracks the role of luck in the lives of three friends, from the Vietnam draft to the Obama presidency; a modern-day Hansel and Gretel who are mysteriously spellbound by a Philadelphia Gilded Age mansion; a young man’s poetic, soul-searching letter to his immigrant mother; an aspirational power couple in love and war in 21st-century New York City; a confused high schooler, toxic masculinity, and the rise of the political right in Topeka, Kansas; misplaced trust, female friendships, and revenge in a Houston suburb; and pioneer women, outlaws, and ghosts in the Arizona Territory of the 1890s. We will investigate a variety of inventive narrative strategies, explore the psychology of numerous fascinating characters, and examine important topics within a context of changing times, changing lives, and a changing America. Readings: Kevin Wilson, Nothing to See Here; Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys; Helen Phillips, The Need; Richard Russo, Chances Are…; Ann Patchett, The Dutch House; Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous; Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble; Ben Lerner, The Topeka School; Susan Choi, Trust Exercise; and Téa Obreht, Inland. Note: Students should read Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson for the first class.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9956 "Thrillingly Original": The Life and Works of Machado de Assis (0 Credits)

The son of a freed slave, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis grew up to become Brazil’s most famous novelist and one of the most brilliant authors of his era worldwide. Indeed, his works seem so contemporary in style and content that it is a shock to realize that he flourished in the late 19th century, around the time of Brazil’s transition from a monarchy to a republic. Machado de Assis’s writings, which give us a portal into Brazilian life and culture, exemplify both the culmination of realism and the nascent stirrings of modernism. They are comic in their mode but philosophical in their implication, and have continuing relevance in the 21st century. We will read Machado de Assis’s three major novels and examine how he succeeded in being, in the words of Susan Sontag, “thrillingly original.”

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9957 Don Quixote and the Quixotic Tradition (0 Credits)

Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote is considered the first great novel, inaugurating not only the novel in Spanish but the idea of modern literature. We will spend half the course reading, in Edith Grossman’s acclaimed 21st-century translation, the adventures of the fatuous but idealistic knight and his faithful servant, Sancho Panza, examining how their story plays with imagination and reality, explores the nature of representation itself, and asks whether we can tell dream from illusion, all while exploring relations between men and women, regions within Spain, Christians and Muslims, and different social classes. We then will read several works, ranging from the 18th to 21st centuries, that have responded to Don Quixote, including Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, Mario Vargas Llosa’s Death in the Andes, and Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte. Redeploying Cervantes’ original story into a diverse set of contexts, these writers extend and renew the quixotic tradition.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9958 The Global Short Story (0 Credits)

The short story has become a vibrant global form, capable of translating experience across cultures and mingling artistic experimentation with a mission to convey the lives of diverse lands and peoples. In this course, we will read two to three short stories per class, discussing how a short story’s concentrated and compelling use of plot, character, imagery, and setting converge to create major literary achievements capable of reverberating around the world. We will read stories whose settings range from Canada, Haiti, and Poland to China, Israel, and Somalia, and are written by, among others, Peter Carey, Banana Yoshimoto, Ben Okri, Haruki Murakami, Peter Høeg, Edwidge Danticat, Tatyana Tolstaya, Julian Barnes, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Chinua Achebe, Carlos Fuentes, Amos Oz, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, and Junot Díaz.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9959 My Brilliant Friend: The Neapolitan World of Elena Ferrante (0 Credits)

Elena Ferrante‘s series of Neapolitan novels is considered one of contemporary world literature’s great masterpieces. Beginning in the years after World War II, Ferrante invites us to follow two girls from a poor neighborhood in Naples whose divergent yet overlapping lives lead us through 60 years and into our century. We will discuss in depth the two major characters—Lila and Elena—examining their strange and powerful relationship and their loves, losses, triumph, despair, and resilience as they articulate the changing lives of modern women. We also will explore the Neapolitan setting, which becomes a character in its own right. Finally, the novels will give us the opportunity to reflect on the extraordinary changes affecting Italy and indeed the entire globe in the last half of the 20th century. Readings for the course will be My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child. Please read the first book, My Brilliant Friend, for the first class.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9961 Introduction to the Hebrew Bible: The Five Books of Moses (Torah) (0 Credits)

Register for this Fall 2022 course on the new <a href="https://nyusps.gatherlearning.com/events/introduction-to-the-hebrew-bible-the-five-books-of-moses-torah">NYU SPS Academy of Lifelong Learning</a> website. Registration for this course will end on Thursday, September 1 at 11:59pm EDT to allow time for processing COVID-related requirements. If you want to register after this date, please contact the academic department at sps.all@nyu.edu to determine if an exception can be made. The first five books of the Bible—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—have had a formative influence on western culture. These books contain some of the best-known biblical tales alongside laws and precepts that have shaped Jewish and Christian views across millennia. They also provide textual evidence of the history, religion, and culture of ancient Israel. In this course, we shall read the entirety of these five books, approaching them from an academic perspective; trace the processes by which these texts came to be formed; consider the multiple sources that shaped them; and analyze their meaning in their present form. No background in religion is necessary to take this course. Questions? Contact us at The Center for Applied Liberal Arts (CALA). Email sps.cala@nyu.edu or call 212-998-7289. Fall 2022 tuition is $659.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9962 Pulp Fiction in Film and Literature (0 Credits)

Explore how American literature's dark underbelly, the pulp novel, has contributed to and enriched our national archetypes. Read the fiction of Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Mickey Spillane, Elmore Leonard, Dennis Lehane, and other writers, and view clips from several films, including The Big Sleep, Kiss Me Deadly, and Chinatown. Expect spirited discussions on a broad variety of topics.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9963 20th-Century China: A History Through Literature (0 Credits)

China’s position on the global stage grows more important and more complex with every political act of the 21st century. But what motives—political, social, and historical—guide contemporary China’s rise to power? In this course, explore China’s recent history through the words of its most significant authors, taking an accessible decade-by-decade approach that aims to chart a course through the ascent of communism, the death of Mao, and beyond to the turn of the millennium. Works will vary from those by the mainland Chinese Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan to Hong Kong-based feminist Xi Xi to secretly circulated and subsequently banned novels by Shanghai’s most daring artists. Reading these works of fiction will provide deep and often unexpected insight into China’s current sociopolitical climate.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9964 Introduction to the Hebrew Bible: War and Prophets (0 Credits)

Prophecy is a subject shrouded in misconceptions. This course will focus on both the institution of prophecy and the individuals who functioned as prophets in ancient Israel, particularly in relation to war. The class will explore the following issues: Is war inevitable? What types of prophets are found in the Hebrew Bible? What role did the prophets play within their larger society? Did different prophets deliver different, or even conflicting, prophecies? Readings will include Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, as well as supplementary material.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9965 New 20th-Century Classics (1.5 Credits)

Delve into the emerging classics of 20th-century literature. Examine these masterpieces within their historical, biographical, social, and literary contexts, and discuss their relevance in the 21st century. With settings ranging from Budapest to London, Paris to Brooklyn, and suburban Connecticut to the supernatural North Sea, we will encounter in these novels a variety of amazing characters: existential philosophers, London sophisticates, magical housekeepers, desperate housewives, excellent women, runaway youngsters, unpredictable artists, and psychic detectives. Readings include Magda Szabo, The Door; Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart; Bernard Malamud, The Assistant; Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road; Patrick Modiano, Dora Bruder; Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason; Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea; and Barbara Pym, Excellent Women.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9966 Primo Levi and the Literature of the Holocaust (0 Credits)

This course will consider what it means to bear witness to the Holocaust through literature. The course centers on Primo Levi, who like many others, was caught between his identity as a survivor and his role as author. We will look at the theory of trauma and the narration of the traumatic event. What is gained, lost, or recovered in the act of bearing witness to tragedy? How does the experience of having been a victim of the Shoah define Levi and the survivor in general? We will analyze the act of writing about the Holocaust, considering Levi’s narrative style as it differs from those of other important survivor authors as well as the significance of genre in understanding traumatic events through literature.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9967 September Song: Elders in Literature (0 Credits)

Becoming older is as much a part of the human story as the discoveries of childhood and adolescence, falling in love, and the angst of middle age. Many writers have tackled the subject--some as observers and others from experience--with older protagonists treated as heroic, pitiful, feisty, addled, angry, or wise. Explore how aging is treated by different cultures through literature and survey a range of viewpoints in stories, poetry, and novels.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9968 Crime and Punishment: On the Page and On-Screen (0 Credits)

Crime, punishment, and redemption are timeless themes that can make for powerful storytelling. As such, they are a source of endless fascination for readers and viewers alike. This class examines how crime, punishment, and redemption are crafted and presented in narratives on the page (Solzhenitsyn¿s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, for example, and George Jackson¿s Soledad Brother) and onscreen (from Longford and A Prophet to Papillon and Dead Man Walking). This class is for anyone with an interest in social justice, popular culture, and gritty storytelling.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9970 Perverse Characters of Literature (0 Credits)

The greatest literary characters are not just flawed, but often wreak havoc on the reader’s enjoyment through their own perversity. Explore these creations in works such as Thomas Hardy’s Tragedy of Two Ambitions (please read before the first session), where a drunken father appears at his daughter’s engagement party; Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, where Bathsheba Everdene is wooed by three men—and chooses the one bound to make her unhappy; William Trevor’s Story of Lucy Gault, where the 12-year old protagonist pretends she has drowned rather than leave Ireland with her parents; and Anthony Trollope’s Last Chronicle of Barset, where Lily Dale refuses her long-time suitor because of a former disappointment in love.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9972 Bon Appétit: Food on Page and Screen (0 Credits)

From the dietary laws codified in religious scripture to the present-day obsession with competitive cooking shows and mukbang videos on YouTube, it is clear that food has much more than mere biological significance. Sampling an assortment of food-themed literature, film, and TV, we will examine how writers, thinkers, and artists have used food to consider the human experience. Examining key metaphors of taste, hunger, and consumption, we will explore issues including racial, gender, and class inequality; the dangers of industrial meat production; and the political unconscious of food porn. On the menu: snippets from the Bible and the Qur’an; the films Ratatouille and The Lunchbox; writing by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, John Lanchester, Ruth Ozeki, and Brian Wood; and the Netflix adaptation of Samurai Gourmet.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9974 The American Novel Today (Fall) (0 Credits)

Discuss major new work by today’s top writers, including emerging novelists, award-winners, and established favorites, all of whom are central to today's cultural conversation. We will investigate a variety of inventive narrative strategies, explore the psychology of numerous fascinating characters, and examine important topics within a context of changing times, changing lives and a changing world. Together we will explore: a father-son road trip to Mt. Rushmore, a surreal black hole in Silicon Valley, all those who lived in a single cabin in the American north woods across the centuries; immigrant Jews, African Americans and the mysteries and surprises of life in a small town in Pennsylvania; Gen X, marriage and the pursuit of happiness in the North Shore of Chicago;  the same day, the same family in three different years in a Brooklyn brownstone; two American wives in Saigon in 1963 and sixty years after;  summer stock on a beautiful lake and taking stock in a beautiful orchard in bucolic Michigan; a four-year-old Mi’kmaq girl  who goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine; a young Asian American chef  who prepares decadent dishes for a secretive millionaire in an exclusive a mountain top safe haven. Readings: Ann Patchett, Tom Lake, Richard Ford, Be Mine; Daniel Mason, North Woods; James McBride, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store; Nathan Hill, Wellness; Percival Everett, James; Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars; Michael Cunningham, Day; Alice McDermott, Absolution; C Pam Zhang, The Land of Milk and Honey.  Students should read Ann Patchett, Tom Lake for the first class.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9975 Shakespearean Controversies: Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice (0 Credits)

Explore two controversial masterpieces and the cultural forces that helped to shape them: The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare’s troubling pre-political-correctness work about the place of Jews—and women—in Renaissance Venice; and Hamlet, a work founded on the towering disparity between appearance and reality, in which intrigue lurks in every corner of the Danish court and no character is what he seems. Is the ghost really Hamlet’s father, or a force of evil bent on Hamlet’s destruction? Is Merchant anti-Semitic, as anti-Semites including the Nazis interpreted it to be, or is it a plea for tolerance? Why must every woman in the play dress as a man to achieve her desires? And why does the play end with a dirty joke?

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9976 William Faulkner: Blood and Memory (0 Credits)

In stark contrast to Ernest Hemingway, who stripped his narratives to the bone, William Faulkner offers us a body of work that embraces the dramatic and the melodramatic, the outrageously beautiful and the poignantly grotesque, and the brutally violent and the rigorously traditional. Throughout his novels, we discover characters who long desperately to break from the past while at the same time are obsessed with histories both familial and epic. In this course, we read a number of Faulkner's novels recognized as among the seminal texts of American literature, including The Sound and the Fury; As I Lay Dying; Absalom, Absalom!; and Sanctuary.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9977 Shakespeare in Love: Witches, Wenches, and Wives (2 Credits)

Explore three of Shakespeare’s masterpieces and the cultural forces that helped to shape them: the rollicking, controversial The Taming of the Shrew, which reputedly champions violence to control an unruly wife; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its enchanted woods, love-struck Athenians, meddlesome fairies, and bumbling troupe of amateur actors whose leading man is turned into a donkey; and Macbeth, in which sexual perversion begets murder, madness, and war, changing the history of Scotland.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9978 Sites of Seduction: Death in Venice and Its Ancient Greek Inspiration (0 Credits)

Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice (1911) is an autobiographical, sensual, shocking masterpiece of modernist fiction. It gains greater depth and poignancy when read in conjunction with Ancient Greek models. In this course, we begin with two works that profoundly influenced Mann’s case study in self-delusion: Euripides’ Bacchae (about self-control and temptation) and excerpts from Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus (about love and philosophy). Through this approach, Death in Venice becomes a conversation across vast expanses of literary time as its protagonist, trapped in the extremes of an orderly life, succumbs to the chaos of rapture. We also will explore Visconti’s 1971 film adaptation.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9979 Literature and Film Go Back to High School (0 Credits)

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. It was high school. The highs and lows of high school have served as inspiration for some of the most iconic American films and novels of our time. Explore multifaceted representations of the high school dynamic across genres, including classics like Forever, Carrie, and The Breakfast Club, as well as more recent favorites such as Election, The Virgin Suicides, and Superbad. Discuss the various tribes that make up a high school population (nerds, jocks,  and popular kids), and uncover the ways in which social and philosophical issues (gender, race, religion, and sexuality) manifest in this unique community.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9980 The Short Fiction of Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges (0 Credits)

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9981 Don Quixote: An Adventure in Reading (2 Credits)

Don Quixote is a work of extraordinary importance, significant not only in itself, but also because of the long-lasting influence it has exerted on the development of modern fiction—and specifically, the novel—as we understand this term today. Writers such as Carlos Fuentes, Milan Kundera, and Vladimir Nabokov, among others, have acknowledged their debt to Cervantes’s The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. As V. S. Pritchett professed, “Don Quixote begins as a province, turns into Spain, and ends up as the universe.” Through close reading, analysis, and class discussion, explore the text’s richness and complexity within the socio-political-cultural framework of late 16th- and early 17th-century Spain.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9982 The Mystique of Paris (1 Credit)

One of the reasons Woody Allen’s recent film Midnight in Paris was so successful is that it tapped into many Americans’ image of <st1:place><st1:city>Paris</st1:city></st1:place> as a magical city. Things happen in <st1:city><st1:place>Paris</st1:place></st1:city> that could occur nowhere else. But why? Examine both the special appeal that <st1:city><st1:place>Paris</st1:place></st1:city> has had for 20th-century writers. Discover the beauty, creativity, and mystery of <st1:place><st1:city>Paris</st1:city></st1:place> for yourself as we read various works and share supplementary photos and music from the instructor’s collections. Works to be considered include: Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast; Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris; Mavis Gallant, Paris Stories; Jamie Cox Robertson, ed., A Literary Paris; Edmund White, The Flaneur; and Adam Gopnik, From Paris to the Moon.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9984 Classic Works of the American Civil War (1.5 Credits)

Although the Civil War is a touchstone of American history, few poems, novels, or short stories from that era have become part of the canon of American literature. Examining the literature that people read and wrote during the time period, however, paints a fuller picture and alters our understanding of how people experienced the War. Investigate fiction based on battlefield experiences, engage with an unflinching slave narrative, and read poetry from the era in an attempt to consider whether literature can ever capture the brutal reality of war. Readings include Ambrose Bierce, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians; Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage; Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; and Walt Whitman, Drum-Taps.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9985 The Short Story: Masterpieces of the Mystery and Horror Genre (1 Credit)

From Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination to Stephen King’s many bestselling story collections, American writers—then and now—always have known the shortest path to our nightmares. Analyze how common fears and anxieties have changed over time through examination of chilling classics by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Poe, Ambrose Bierce, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert W. Chambers, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Robert Bloch, Shirley Jackson, Tony Hillerman, Donald Westlake, King, and other great practitioners of the American mystery and horror tale.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9986 Reading Shakespeare: The Pleasure of Tragedy (0 Credits)

In this eight-week class, we will examine the pleasure we derive from tragedy through discussions of Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. Why are these plays continually popular? Why do we return to them despite stories that fill us with pity and terror?  Scenes of violence rivet our attention. Wicked characters fascinate us. Evil and grace clash, often to the detriment of the latter. Yet this is the very nature of tragedy, a literary genre which appeals both to our hearts and to our aesthetic sensibilities. This class, then, has a double focus. We will discuss the plots, characters, and issues specific to Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. We will also attempt to answer, as a group, a broader question: How can we explain the delight we derive from great works of art like these - works that disturb us, yet somehow also soothe us, teach us, and inspire us?

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9987 Anti-Realism and Artifice in American Literature (1.5 Credits)

The United States has long been defined by newness and unrelenting progress. Through another lens, however, this affinity for constant change can be seen as contributing to a superficial and fake culture. Intriguingly, many canonical works of American literature—especially from the last century—celebrate ostentation and phoniness as clever and theatrical. Beginning with The Great Gatsby, examine the cultural shift from realism to anti-realism, and review some of the most beloved national classics. While the focus is primarily literary, including such authors as William Faulkner, Nella Larsen, and Vladimir Nabokov, the class also forays into film, television, art, and music.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9988 Masterpieces of 20th-Century Fiction (0 Credits)

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9990 Four New Yorkers: Isaac Bashevis Singer, Louis Auchincloss, Ralph Ellison, Vivian Gornick (0 Credits)

What does it mean to be a New Yorker? By reading the New York-based fiction and memoir by these four writers, we will get four answers to that question, as we explore refugee New York, “blue blood” New York, and African American New York. By Singer we will read some short stories and one novel, by Auchincloss some short stories, and by Ellison his great novel Invisible Man. We will round it off with a look at the New York of the recent (pre-COVID) past in Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City. Be advised that the course involves a good deal of reading.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9992 Resistance, Romance, and Risk: Literature of Paris Under Occupation (0 Credits)

The terror of the Nazi occupation of Paris has served as inspiration for generations of writers. From the bullets and bombs of the invasion to life under Nazi rule and the victorious liberation, the occupation of the City of Light has inspired stories of fear, betrayal, patriotism, sacrifice, and triumph—some even true. Read and discuss literature written during the occupation and contemporary novels set in the time period. Books discussed include Suite Française, The Paris Architect, The Sixth Lamentation, and Sarah’s Key. Films and historical accounts are given to complement the novels.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes

LITR1-CE 9993 Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (0 Credits)

A century after she started publishing her major works, Virginia Woolf remains an icon. Her characters are cultural touchstones, inspiring countless novelists, poets, and filmmakers, and her modernist works are literary classics. However, many people are not familiar with her works or find them difficult to understand. In this class, read Woolf’s most innovative novels, including Mrs Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves, explore her aesthetic concerns, and discover what her work reveals about the human experience, levels of consciousness, and the interconnectedness our lives and shared experiences.

Grading: SPS Non-Credit Graded

Repeatable for additional credit: Yes