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Literature Classes NYC

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Explore the captivating world of literature in the heart of NYC with a range of classes covering diverse genres, from classic literature and poetry to modern fiction and creative writing, where participants can enhance their understanding and appreciation for the written word.

5 classes have spots left

Virginia Woolf: Embodiment and Novel Experiments

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 230 5th Ave, Brooklyn, NY

In an essay called “Flying Over London,” Virginia Woolf imagines herself as a passenger on an airplane passing over the city. Her imagined journey becomes an occasion to think about both the lures of a fixed, constant subjectivity and the shifting currents of an unstable modernity. This fraught relationship with the self (and the flight from it) offers a crystalline lens through which to view Woolf’s experiments in writing and thinking the...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

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The Divine Comedy

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 600 Vanderbilt Ave, Brooklyn, NY

Dante’s Divine Comedy follows the journey of the poet through hell, purgatory, and paradise. This epic Italian poem, composed between 1308 and 1321, is an allegory for the movement of the soul toward God. But it is also a multifaceted exploration of ethics, metaphysics, politics, love, order, chaos, poetic form, and the Classical literary tradition.  In this course, we’ll read The Divine Comedy in translation—Inferno, Purgatorio,...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

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Gothic Feminism: Repression, Transgression, and Range

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 20 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY

Madwomen, ghosts, witches, monsters—the gothic genre has long been a vehicle for representing female characters deemed too transgressive for inclusion in “respectable” fiction. Indeed, much of what makes the gothic dark and mysterious, what inspires dread, is how it reckons with thwarted female autonomy, repressed desire, and past injustice. It’s no wonder the genre has proved so fruitful for feminist theory: in its tales and archetypes,...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

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Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY

Ovid begins his Metamorphoses, “My soul would speak of bodies changed into new forms,” and it is the great theme of physical transformation that unites the poem’s many myths: humans becomes animals and plants, and vice versa; humans becomes stones and constellations; and humans change their sex. No poem from antiquity has so influenced Western European literature and art. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dante creatively raided Ovid’s...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

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Fredric Jameson: What is Postmodernism?

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY

“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 has replaced modernism as the “cultural dominant” of late capitalism. In conversation with...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

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The Task of the Critic: an Introduction to Rosalind Krauss

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY

Uncover the transformative power of poststructuralist, feminist, and psychoanalytic methods in art criticism through an exploration of the writings and ideas of Rosalind Krauss, the influential founder of October journal. Analyze representative artworks alongside her essays, as you delve into the ways in which art objects and movements challenge categorization and reshape aesthetic experience. Discover how Krauss's unique theoretical vocabulary redefines the role of the critic in art historical narratives.

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$335

4 sessions

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Marxism and Utopia: an Introduction to Ernst Bloch (In-Person)

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY

Explore the enduring relevance of utopian thinking through the work of Ernst Bloch in this thought-provoking course. Delve into his vision of a non-alienated future and examine how art and literature can inspire political transformation. Join us as we challenge the proliferation of dystopian imaginaries and embrace the power of hope, imagination, and anticipation.

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$335

4 sessions

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Reading Shakespeare

92nd Street Y @ 1395 Lexington Ave, New York, NY

Join James Shapiro, the Larry Miller Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, for a seminar on Shakespeare’s long narrative poems: “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece,” both of which he composed during a plague outbreak in June 1592, when the theatres were closed for nearly six months, and “A Lover’s Complaint.” Professor Shapiro recommends the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Shakespeare’s...

(1061) All levels 18 and older
No upcoming schedules
$300

2 sessions

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Great American Fiction

92nd Street Y @ 1395 Lexington Ave, New York, NY

Experience the creative genius of some of the nation’s most gifted authors, both past and present. Please read Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena for the first class, Edna Ferber’s So Big for the second, James Alan McPherson’s Elbow Room for the third, Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women for the fourth, and William Faulkner’s The Reivers for the final session. Please read each work before the corresponding session....

(1061) All levels 18 and older
No upcoming schedules
$135

5 sessions

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Great Short Novels

92nd Street Y @ 1395 Lexington Ave, New York, NY

Delve into some of the best short novels of the 20th century. Spend the first weeks of summer delving into some of the best short novels. 

(1061) All levels 18 and older
No upcoming schedules
$120

4 sessions

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Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

A novel of cruelty, poisoned love, ruthless necessity, intergenerational vendettas, memory and revenge, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights remains an opulent enigma. First published under the male pseudonym, Ellis Bell, the book puzzled and repulsed its initial readers, who castigated it for immorality but reluctantly acknowledged its inscrutable power.  In a preface to the novel, Charlotte Brontë attempted to vindicate her sister by arguing...

(29) All levels 21 and older
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Love is a Weapon

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

In this course we look closely at Gandhi’s South Africa years—a time of both racial warfare, and great love and friendship—to understand the source of the philosophies and practices that would later inspire many currents of the civil rights movement in the United States. While many analyses of Gandhi and his thought focus on ideas and influences from Braminical and Jain sources, this course will focus on the South African moment and this archive...

(29) All levels 21 and older
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Marxism and Culture

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Marxism and Culture: Georg Lukacs, Revolution, and Consciousness “Materialist dialectic is a revolutionary dialectic.” So wrote the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács in March 1919 as a participant in the proletarian revolutions sweeping Europe in the wake of World War I. In a series of essays written in response to the Bolshevik Revolution, Lukács re-conceptualized orthodox Marxism in Hegelian terms, at once restoring dialectical materialism...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

Middlemarch

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Virginia Woolf called George Eliot’s Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” Henry James described it as “at once one of the strongest and one of the weakest of English novels… a treasure-house of details [and] an indifferent whole.” In our own time, Middlemarch is widely considered the finest Victorian novel, and is the subject of popular books as well as endless scholarly conversation. Who was George...

(29) All levels 21 and older
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Darwin: Genes, Generation, Genealogy

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species produced a radical paradigm shift in thinking about the living world.  After Darwin, the origins of life were no longer miraculous or murky: life could build itself, meaning humanity no longer stood apart from the natural world or required a supernatural character.  This work remains, for some, controversial, but it is a key tenet of all contemporary biological inquiry. Over the course...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

Modern Poetry: Memory and Desire

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

“April is the cruelest month,” writes T.S. Eliot in the opening lines of The Waste Land (1922), “breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire.” What does modern poetry remember, and what does modern poetry want? This course, an introduction to the exhilarating, maddening, and strange experiments of twentieth-century poetry, explores how poets responded to the astonishing social, political, aesthetic, and technological...

(29) All levels 21 and older
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Poetry and Poetics: An Introduction

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 230 5th Ave, Brooklyn, NY

What is poetry and what is it good for? These questions have long haunted practitioners and readers of this “beautiful and pointless” art, to quote the contemporary critic David Orr. But “beautiful and pointless” were not always the terms of the debate. On the contrary, these questions about what poetry is and what it does mean something profoundly different in our contemporary moment than they meant in centuries past. Nor is this sense of...

(29) Beginner 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

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Myth, Punishment & the Rising Waters: Reading the Flood

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

The biblical story of the Flood permeates the popular imagination. The plot is certainly familiar— an entire world submerged in water, pairs of animals marching onto the ark, eventual redemption—but our ability to realize the power of this story is often hampered by assumptions about its history or its primitive character. Yet, far from a single localized myth, the story of the flood is central to a range of ancient cultures—from Mesopotamia...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

State, Power, and Democratic Socialism

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

State, Power, and Democratic Socialism: an Introduction to Nicos Poulantzas “One thing is certain, socialism will be democratic or it will not be at all.” So wrote the Greek Marxist and theoretician Nicos Poulantzas, just a year before his untimely death. Poulantzas’s work, newly rediscovered by sections of the U.S. left, constitutes a highly original set of writings on the nature of political power in both liberal-democratic and authoritarian...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

American Populism

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

American Populism: History, Democracy, and Agrarian Revolt In recent decades, populism in the U.S. has most visibly been a right-wing phenomenon—from Pat Buchanan to the Tea Party to Trump—often overlapping politically with plutocracy and white nationalism. However, the largest populist movement in American history, the People’s Party of the 1890s, arose on the left, and is arguably one of the most radically democratic political formations...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
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