Literature Classes in NYC, New York

Developed as a tool for colonial empire-building at the close of the 19th century, the ethnographic method has become an important practice for telling the stories of the oppressed, designing for the future, and demanding social change. British and American anthropologists were initially concerned with understanding the discrete cultures of “savage”...

For the historian C. Vann Woodward, living in the South at the height of Jim Crow, it was literature that awoke him to the myths and dissimulation of official white supremacy. In particular, William Faulkner’s novels—his 1936 classic Absalom, Absalom! especially—challenged the tendency of Southern historians to justify and validate...

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,...

Art was anything but peripheral to Kant’s philosophical project. In judging a thing to be beautiful, Kant maintained, we bridge “the great gulf” of nature and human freedom, and prepare ourselves to “love something, even nature, without interest”—that is, exercise moral judgment. Immensely influential in its time, the so-called “third...

Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch: Women, Colonization, and Capitalism The “witch” embodies a world of female subjects that capitalism had to destroy. This bold argument is the premise of Silvia Federici’s book, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. For Federici, perhaps best known for the manifesto “Wages...

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...

Join us for a workshop that explores how music and poetry inspire artists. Discover the relationship between visual art, music, and language. View works of art in the exhibition Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything along with works in the Jewish Museum collection. Following the tour, educators will participate in art making activities that integrate...

Explore our redesigned catalog. Search for books and other materials, learn how to place holds, rate an item, add items to your shelves, look at reviews and create lists.

Hold on to your number 2 pencils, we’re taking on the SATs. We've taken high school’s most stressful test, sprinkled some comedy on it, and turned it into a drinking game! Your favorite test proctor and comedian Michael Wolf (Comedy Central, MTV) has combined bar-room trivia with real SAT quizzes to create NYC's booziest classroom. Whether you've...

So many actors want to write but are unsure how to start. Others are intimidated. But why should that be? Many of the skills needed to write – understanding how dialogue reveals character, how scenes are structured, how the action of the play reveals the truth of the story – are skills every good actor already has. This class will teach actors...

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 writer Clarice Lispector moved in mystery. The author of nine novels and a large body of short stories, journalism, and children’s...