Published in 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has transcended the era of its creation to become a classic. It describes the moral and spiritual toll exacted by that quintessentially American quest, the pursuit of happiness, the “orgiastic future” that “year by year recedes before us.” This seminar explores the novel’s themes and language … Continued
Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time helped to create the idiom of modernist literature, which would go on to become the predominant literary aesthetic of the 20th century. Emerging from the world of the Parisian little magazines, Hemingway brought the literary avant-garde to mass popular audiences. In the process he defined an enduring cultural style and … Continued
There is little question that the dynamic outpouring of Black arts and letters, known as the Harlem Renaissance, forever changed the course and shape of the modern world. Yet few have situated the renaissance within its larger context, when the “renaissance” was simply one part of a New Negro movement that spanned the globe. In … Continued
In 1845, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave compared slavery to a “tomb” from which he resurrected himself through forcible resistance to a Maryland slave-breaker named Edward Covey. In 1901, the most influential post-Civil War slave narrative, Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, referred to “the school of American … Continued
When Thoreau wrote Civil Disobediencein 1849 he was responding to slavery and the Mexican War, but his essay resonates today as Americans grapple with issues like terrorism, abortion, and civil liberties. In this webinar we examine what was Thoreau’s argument? Is his vision of radical individualism workable in a democracy? How did he critique representative … Continued
This webinar explores what Hawthorne is trying to tell us in “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and “The Birthmark”? Fairy-tale like romances, how do they speak to us in the technologically sophisticated twenty-first century? What do these stories tell us about intellectual pride, about believing in scientific progress, about striving for perfection in an imperfect world, about the … Continued
We often think of the Cold War in terms of the nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union, or the “hot” wars in Korea and Vietnam. But the Cold War had a cultural dimension as well, and books, movies, music, and painting were routinely enlisted in the struggle against communism. This webinar … Continued
Since its publication in 1970, The Bluest Eye has remained a literary classic, a staple taught in classrooms across the country. The first novel to powerfully depict what “that race thing feels like” from the perspective of a little black girl who longs for blue eyes during the racist, sexist climate of 1940s Ohio, the … Continued
Ernest Hemingway may no longer be revered as he once was, but he remains among the most influential of twentieth-century American writers. In this seminar, we will try to rediscover the qualities that made Hemingway so important. What was it about his prose and narrative style, his ideas about art and experience, his view of … Continued
This series will compare three fictional accounts of war widely taught in American high schools. It will illuminate how the depiction of war evolved from the romance-tinged realism of The Red Badge of Courage through the unsparing naturalism of All Quiet on the Western Front to the knowing irony of The Things They Carried. How … Continued