Courses

This course aims to equip students with critical tools for approaching, reading, and striving with literary and philosophical texts—ancient as well as modern. To this end, we will be working closely with a set of texts that range in date from the 8th/7th c. BCE to the 20th century C, including: Homer, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Du Bois, Nabokov and Rankine. Our seminar will operate on the assumption that we cannot know “what” these texts say or “what” their authors mean unless we come to grips with how they say what they say and how they mean what they mean. In pursuit of some answers, we will master the skill of reading quickly but carefully, balancing attention to the literary craft of our texts with scrutiny of their underlying arguments and agendas.
Requires Instructor’s permission— please write to Richard Roderick [email protected] to set up a meeting with instructors.