The School of Letters & Tongues · language, literature & writing
World Literature & Poetry
The world's stories and poems read slowly and in company, from Gilgamesh to the novel on your nightstand.
Annotation, attention, and the move from what a passage says to what it does.
Syllabus · 3 units · ~14 hours
Unit I — First Pass, Second Pass
Annotation as thinking · What to notice: diction, image, tone · Summary versus interpretation
Unit II — The Evidence of the Text
Working from the words on the page · Ambiguity and multiple readings · Claims a passage can and cannot support
Unit III — Writing the Close Reading
From observation to thesis · The explication essay · Common pitfalls: paraphrase and overreach
Four thousand years of the long heroic poem, and what each age asked its heroes to carry.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~30 hours
Unit I — Gilgamesh and the Oldest Story
Kingship, friendship, and mortality · Tablet culture and textual gaps · The flood narrative and its echoes
Unit II — Homer
Oral composition and the formula · The Iliad: wrath and its costs · The Odyssey: homecoming and disguise
Unit III — Virgil and the Political Epic
The Aeneid as commissioned epic · Pietas and empire · Dido and the cost of destiny
Unit IV — After Antiquity
Beowulf and the northern hero · Dante's pilgrim · Paradise Lost and the end of the classical epic
The working parts of a poem — line, sound, image, form — and how to hear them without a decoder.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~18 hours
Unit I — The Line
Line breaks and enjambment · Free verse is not formless · The stanza
Unit II — Sound
Meter: hearing the iamb · Rhyme, slant rhyme, and the refusal to rhyme · Alliteration and assonance
Unit III — Image and Figure
Concrete image before abstract statement · Metaphor and simile at work · Symbols and how not to over-read them
Unit IV — Whole Poems
The sonnet and its turn · The villanelle and other fixed forms · Reading a poem aloud, well
From Don Quixote to the contemporary global novel — how prose fiction became the way we explain ourselves.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~28 hours
Unit I — Before the Novel
Romance, picaresque, and the frame tale · Don Quixote and the birth of the modern novel · Print, literacy, and the new reader
Unit II — The Eighteenth Century
Defoe and the illusion of the real · Richardson, Fielding, and the quarrel over virtue · The epistolary form
Unit III — The Novel at Full Strength
Austen's irony · Dickens and the serial · Tolstoy, Eliot, and the social panorama
Unit IV — Breaking the Frame
Flaubert and the discipline of style · Modernism: Joyce and Woolf · The contemporary global novel
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, Hamlet, and The Tempest — read as scripts, heard as verse.
Syllabus · 5 units · ~24 hours
Unit I — Reading Shakespeare's Language
Blank verse and how to hear it · Early Modern English: false friends · The playhouse and the printed text
Unit II — A Midsummer Night's Dream
The architecture of comedy · The play within the play · Love as spell and as choice
Unit III — Macbeth
Ambition and prophecy · Imagery of blood, sleep, and darkness · Lady Macbeth and agency
Unit IV — Hamlet
The soliloquy · Delay and interpretation · Ghosts, revenge, and the theater itself
Unit V — The Tempest
The late romances · Prospero's art and his abdication · The island and its afterlives
Poe to Chekhov to Borges to Munro — what a story can do in twenty pages that a novel cannot.
Syllabus · 3 units · ~15 hours
Unit I — The Shape of the Short Story
Poe and the single effect · Chekhov and the undramatic ending · Economy: what a story leaves out
Unit II — Voices Across Borders
Borges and the story as idea · Achebe, Mahfouz, and the weight of place · O'Connor and the American grotesque
Unit III — The Contemporary Story
Munro and compressed time · Flash fiction · Reading a collection as a whole