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Literature Classes Coming up in New York and Online

4 classes in-person in New York have spots left, and 8 classes live online are available.

The Abyss I am Made Of: an Intro to Clarice Lispector

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY 11201

The Abyss I am Made Of: an Introduction to Clarice Lispector Compared over the course of her life to Marlene Dietrich, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Rimbaud, a sphinx, a she-wolf, a “foreigner on earth,” and a hurricane, the Jewish Brazilian Clarice Lispector, born to Ukrainian parents who fled to Brazil from interwar pogroms, made an indelible stamp on the literature of her adopted homeland—and...

Thursday Jul 13th, 6:30–9:30pm Eastern Time

 (4 sessions)

$335

4 sessions

Fiction and Inner Life: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY 11201

Can words describe what Virginia Woolf calls “the daily drama of the body”? Can literature verbalize our interiority: physical and spiritual change, the home, the mind, and the relationships between them? In her celebrated novel Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf’s eponymous protagonist is plagued with perpetual anxiety: Clarissa Dalloway is always on the verge of sickness, waking up on a sunny morning with a feeling of “terror,” “overwhelming incapacity,”...

Tuesday Jul 11th, 6:30–9:30pm Eastern Time

 (4 sessions)

$335

4 sessions

Science 101: Our Gayest Show Ever

Caveat @ 21-A Clinton St, New York, NY 10002

Games, ridiculous audience polls, blistering hot takes, "art" challenges, votes for tenure, and real, actual scientists, SCIENCE 101 is the only "class" where attendance is 99% of your grade. YOUR HOSTS: Dustin Growick is a dinosaur expert and the Science Specialist at Sotheby's. Kristina Gustovich is a geologist and a Middle School science teacher. Dr. Justin Charles Williams is a stand-up comedian and an Associate Professor in the Division of Interdisciplinary...

Friday Jun 9th, 9:30–11pm Eastern Time

$24.05

What Mad Pursuit?

Think Olio @ 1000 5th Ave, New York, NY 10028

"What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?" —"Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats Since Plato published the Republic, ekphrasis has survived as a form of response for thousands of years. Artists throughout history have used ekphrasis to read between the lines of art, music, literature, and everything in between. In this Olio, we will briefly discuss and learn about ekphrastic poetry,...

Friday Aug 4th, 5–7pm Eastern Time

Ethnopornography: Race, Erotics, and Domination

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom

Early anthropology had a sex problem. By day it studied kinship—how legitimately procreative sex produces a society—collected intimate items, and photographed naked subjects; by night, it hung around corners, pestered and menaced its way into intimate spaces. These early anthropologists were not alone. Their settler peers developed obsessions in schoolgirls and purchased wives, in erotic genres of parlor photography, in romantic rape literature,...

Sunday Jun 11th, 2–5pm Eastern Time

 (4 sessions)

$335

4 sessions

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Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom

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 tales...

Thursday Jul 6th, 6:30–9:30pm Eastern Time

 (4 sessions)

$335

4 sessions

Reading Fiction

Alaa Al Aswany Creative Writing Workshop

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 authors as Anton Chekhov, Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel García Márquez, Kate Chopin, Fyodor Dostoevsky,...

Monday Jun 19th, 6:30–9:30pm Eastern Time

 (5 sessions)

$675

5 sessions

Don Quixote: Into the World of the Book

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom

Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote is, perhaps above all else, a book about books. The title character’s voracious consumption of books of chivalry drives him mad, leading him to interpret windmills as giants, common inns as majestic castles, and prostitutes as highborn damsels. In addition to the medieval romances that Don Quixote reads, a variety of texts in different forms populate the narrative: Arabic manuscripts, short stories...

Wednesday Jun 14th, 6:30–9:30pm Eastern Time

 (4 sessions)

$335

4 sessions

Reading Fiction in Arabic

Alaa Al Aswany Creative Writing Workshop

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 chapter is an essential preparation for anyone who wants to study creative writing.

Wednesday Sep 20th, 3:30–6:30pm Eastern Time

 (5 sessions)

$675

5 sessions

Becoming Cyborg: Science and Science-Fiction

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom

Feminist science studies scholar Donna Haraway writes: “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are all cyborgs.” Haraway goes on to argue in her canonical essay, “A Manifesto For Cyborgs,” that to be a cyborg means to live in a world without tidy origin stories or innocent wholeness. Instead, it is about partial connections, complex...

Sunday Jun 11th, 2–5pm Eastern Time

 (4 sessions)

$335

4 sessions

From Capitalist Realism to Acid Communism

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

From Capitalist Realism to Acid Communism: an Introduction to Mark Fisher Most of the writings of the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher began their life not as academic papers or monographs or fully wrought essays but as blog posts, online responses, and even internet comments. These writings—including those that would be later collected into his some of his most famous texts—reflect one of the most unique theoretical voices of the early 21st...

Tuesday Jun 13th, 6:30–9:30pm Eastern Time

 (4 sessions)

$335

4 sessions

Creative Writing Weekly via Zoom

The Writing Studio @ Live Online via Zoom

In this class, you will learn first and foremost that you can write—and write well! In fact you will surprise yourself by the work you’ll be producing. The class is designed to enhance your creativity, imagination and personal voice while also teaching the skills of creative writing—memoir and fiction. This is an ongoing class geared toward those who are committed to writing and will continue this practice overtime....

Monday Jun 12th, 6:30–9:30pm Pacific Time

 (4 sessions)

$200

4 sessions

209 literature classes that have ended
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The Correspondence: Music and Literature

92nd Street Y @ 1395 Lexington Ave, New York, NY 10128

A unique and unforgettable mixture of performance, writing, and history of classical music led by Elena Baksht, founding director of the Southampton Arts Festival and Music at Lincoln Center, and “one of the most intriguing pianists of her generation.” An electrifying performer and engaging teacher, Baksht’s fascination with literature’s surprising connections to musical performance is contagious. Our knowledge of music can only deepen with...

No upcoming schedules
$160

4 sessions

Literature as Identity in Fahrenheit 451

Think Olio @ 574 President St, Brooklyn, NY 11215

Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451”, first published in 1953, is the latest in a series of dystopian fiction classics that have become handbooks for our troubled times. But there is more to “Fahrenheit 451” than the eerie déjà vu quality it projects onto the tumult of 2018. At its heart, Fahrenheit 451 is as much a love story as it is a prescient depiction of a brutalized totalitarian society and its pathologically isolated population. ...

No upcoming schedules

Forgiveness and the Unforgivable: Religion, Literature

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY 11201

Forgiveness and the Unforgivable: Religion, Literature, Philosophy What constitutes an apology? Are certain kinds of acts unforgivable—and, if so, why? Who, indeed, has the power to forgive? In this course, we’ll set these questions in historical context, beginning with Bishop Joseph Butler’s eighteenth-century sermons, then exploring discussions of resentment in Nietzsche and guilt in Dostoyevski, before turning to post-Holocaust literature...

No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

Introduction to Latin American Literature

Easy Español @ 10 E 39 St, New York, NY 10018

The Introduction to Latin American Literature Course is an opportunity for the student to acquaint themselves with Latin America society through its literature. The goal of this course is to enable each student to acquire the skills necessary for the enjoyment and interpretation of literary and cultural issues in a foreign language.Students will become familiar with the historical, political and cultural settings that resulted in the great literary...

No upcoming schedules
$149

6 sessions

The Bible as Literature: Narrative, Politics, & History

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 612 W 116th St, New York, NY 10027

The Bible is a wonderfully comprehensive collection of stories: a parade of heroes and villains, royals and peasants, dysfunctional families and the truest of filial loyalties.  Its texts span genres from poetry to novella, short story to historical epic, legalistic writing to satire, and instructional manual to the confessional. However, this simple fact of the Bible’s literary quality and variety often gets lost in discussions of authorship...

No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

Cold Pastoral: Literature, Nature, and the Anthropocene

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY 11201

What do ideas of nature have to tell us about literature and how it works? Through the medium of the pastoral—variously defined as a genre, a set of rhetorical moves, or an uneasy collection of tropes—writers have evoked, described, and accounted for nature and humanity’s place within it. From visions of Arcadia to Paradise to the Golden Age, the pastoral theme has always been intertwined with a series of philosophical, aesthetic, and historical...

No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

World History, World Literature & You (for Teens)

Classeteria @ 284 Suydam St, Brooklyn, NY 11237

In this course, we will use literature as a point of entry into three thousand years of history, society, and culture that has led to you being a teenager in the United States in 2018.  We will study texts from a wide variety of times and places, including Asia, Africa, Europe, the Americas, and the Pacific Rim, from ancient times to right now. Through these texts, we will explore aspects of identity such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality,...

No upcoming schedules
$600

20 sessions

Literature and Colonialism: Joseph Conrad & Tayeb Salih

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY 11201

Famously excoriated by Chinua Achebe as an “offensive and deplorable” dehumanization of the lives of Africans, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness may be one of the most intensively scrutinized and adapted works of modern European literature. Achebe’s critique has since been contested, not least as a deliberate misreading of Conrad’s own perhaps ambivalent understanding of the industrialized barbarism of Belgian colonialism in the Congo....

No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

E. Said’s Orientalism: Literature and the Non-European

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY 11201

What is “Orientalism”? And why has the book that defined it as a Western body of knowledge remained so popular as a key text of critical theory? Published in 1978, Edward Said’s Orientalism immediately attracted both praise and censure. For Said, the notion that the world is divided—politically, culturally, and morally—into the oppositional categories of East and West was an intellectual creation, which supported and facilitated...

No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

Best of World Literature

92nd Street Y @ Online Classroom, New York, NY 00000

Enjoy the stunning work of these authors from around the world. Please read Natalia Ginzburg’s Happiness, as Such for the first class, Kobo Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes for the second, the first half of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook for the third, the second half of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook for the fourth, and Anna Burns’ Milkman for the final session. Please read each work before the corresponding session..

No upcoming schedules
$175

5 sessions

French Literature & Feminism

Learn French BK @ 3650 N Nevada Ave, Colorado Springs, CO 80132

The language of love lends HER voice to seminal stories of Super Hero Femmes.  Learn French Brooklyn lead instructor Souad Bouhayat offers expert instruction and guidance to this impassioned subject matter. Each workshop follows a predetermined curriculum and study plan.  Book excerpts are read, dissected and discussed in an equally academic and open manner. Familiarity of each work is helpful, but not required. Classes may be taken as...

No upcoming schedules
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