James Shapiro on Shakespeare (Online)

Anthropology is at once a contested and vital field of study and inquiry. Still hotly debated is a basic question: what is the scope of anthropological inquiry? Modern anthropologists no longer divide the world, as their 19th-century forebears did, into a sociological “West” and an anthropological “rest of the world,” its “backwardness”...

This workshop teaches the tools to appreciate literary works and learn from accomplished writers from around the world. Students learn to interpret fiction, recognize underlying themes, decipher writing techniques, and analyze the human content of each story. Through readings, writing exercises, and class discussions, we examine works by such diverse...

In this class, students learn the rules of literary appreciation and study a range of classical and modern literary works by great writers. Students will learn the different methods of literary analysis with its five elements (story - characters - style - plot - human content) and they will practice critical reading comparing different texts...This...

“The postmodern,” writes Marxist literary and cultural theorist Fredric Jameson, “is the force field in which very different kinds of cultural impulses . . . must make their way.” Adapted from a New Left Review essay of the same name, Jameson’s Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism is an ambitious account of how the postmodern...

What does it mean to be human in the world today? Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) is a provocative treatise on what it means to live on earth and share the world in common. Her study, originally intended to be titled Amor Mundi (Love of the World), investigates the central activities of human life—labor, work, action—and their corresponding...