In this seminar, we examine selections from William Shakespeare’s sonnets, first published in 1609. We read and discuss three sonnets per meeting. By keeping the scope of selections of sonnets narrow, we hope to create the space necessary to pay close attention to each individual line, as well as to the wholes that these lines make up. In other words, the aim of the seminar is to think carefully about Shakespeare’s use of this poetic form.

Text: William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Poems (Folger Shakespeare Library). Simon & Schuster, ISBN: 978-0743273282

“This book is like any other book. But I would be happy if it were only read by people whose souls are already formed.” Thus begins Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s address to possible readers in her mesmerizing monologic novel The Passion According to G.H. (1964). It’s not clear how we ought to understand these words, for this book is evidently unlike just any other book. Formal features set it apart: the eccentric prose, filled with literary and linguistic experiments, challenges the boundary of articulation. Even more striking is Lispector’s subject matter: the living, embodied self, caught in the process of ever becoming.

Clarice Lispector belongs to the highest rung of modern writers. In this seminar we read two works by her: the aforementioned novel, The Passion According to G.H., and—equally enigmatic—her last novella, The Hour of the Star (1977). Under her guidance, we ponder the nature of life and written speech.

Texts:

Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star (tr. Benjamin Moser), New Directions, ISBN: 978-0811219495

Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H. (tr. Idra Novey), New Directions, ISBN: 978-0811219686

As the father of the Haiku, Bashō (1644-1694) has had a profound influence on world literature. He pioneered a distinctive triune genre that fuses poetry, philosophical musings, and travel narrative into seamless prose poems that are both dreamlike and relentlessly objective. No other poet finds so much inspiration from grueling discomfort and bodily frailty, and writing from the road is, for Bashō, a way to encounter mortality and the transience that makes beauty possible. During this week we study six of Basho’s travel narratives, including his great masterpiece, “The Narrow Road to the Deep North.”

Text: Matsuo Bashō, Bashō’s Journey: The Literary Prose of Matsuo Bashō  (tr. David Landis Barnhill), State University of New York Press, ISBN: 978-0791464144

Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude opens with one of the most striking sentences in contemporary literature: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” On every page, Márquez delivers these kinds of lines, which take his reader into the multigenerational story of the Buendía family and its home on the island of Macondo. Márquez crafts his stories in magical prose to plumb the depths of human history, politics, family, time, and the haunting wonders of life. We spend the week exploring the imagined world of a master.

Text: Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (tr. Gregory Rabassa), Harper Perennial Modern, ISBN: 978-0061120091

The Brothers Karamazov is one of the greatest European novels of the 19th century and of all time: a murder mystery, a profound spiritual investigation, and an inquiry into justice, forgiveness, loyalty, and friendship. This “philosophical” novel has been called “the most uniquely Russian work of literature ever written.” It’s the story of three brothers and of three ways of living: the appetitive, the intellectual, and the way of faith. Dostoevsky’s novel captures not only the Russian soul but the fundamental struggle faced by human beings tempted by greed, lust, and vengeance on the one hand and the possibility of love, nobility, and redemption on the other.

Text: Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky), Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN: 978-0374528379

The Brothers Karamazov is one of the greatest European novels of the 19th century and of all time: a murder mystery, a profound spiritual investigation, and an inquiry into justice, forgiveness, loyalty, and friendship. This “philosophical” novel has been called “the most uniquely Russian work of literature ever written.” It’s the story of three brothers and of three ways of living: the appetitive, the intellectual, and the way of faith. Dostoevsky’s novel captures not only the Russian soul but the fundamental struggle faced by human beings tempted by greed, lust, and vengeance on the one hand and the possibility of love, nobility, and redemption on the other.

Text: Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky), Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN: 978-0374528379

At the opening of the novel, we learn that Marianne and Elinor Dashwood’s father has died and that their stepbrother and his family will inherit their home. Because of the stepbrother’s stinginess, the sisters are not only forced out of their home but are deprived of the income intended for them. The opening of the novel could read thus: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in want of a good fortune must be in want of a husband.” In Sense and Sensibility, we have two such women who pursue their wants in very different ways.

Text: Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility: Norton Critical Edition, W. W. Norton & Company, ISBN: 978-0393977516

Dante and Shakespeare, as has been said, divide the world between them—there is no third. In this seminar, participants begin to explore that half of the world (that undiscovered country) uncovered by Dante. They descend into the Inferno, volume one of Dante’s three-volume epic, The Divine Comedy. Guided by Virgil, Dante journeys through the nine circles of Hell, where damned sinners of every type suffer vividly, audibly, in just accordance with their unrepented sins. Fear is felt at the gruesome images and touching stories of incontinence, madness, brutishness, malice, and fraudulence—all too native. Yet Virgil forbids pity, for this descent is not into tragedy. Even non-believers in Dante’s salvific God have felt, from his Inferno alone, that their possessing of a human soul is a responsibility towards eternity. Without that feeling, the depths and heights both go flat.

Text: Any one of these three editions is recommended.

• Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Volume 1: Inferno (ed. and tr. Robert M. Durling), Oxford University Press, ISBN: 978-0195087444
• Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy Volume 1: Inferno (tr. John D. Sinclair), Oxford University Press, ISBN: 978-0195004120
• Dante Alighieri, The Inferno (tr. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander), Anchor Books, ISBN: 978-0385496988

Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is often held up as the book that changed the novel. The story follows the inner life of its titular character, Emma Bovary, whose affinity for romance novels stirs her contempt for her husband and fuels a series of entanglements and affairs. Flaubert took painstaking efforts to portray the psyche with natural accuracy, and he developed a literary style to achieve his artistic vision. The result: a masterpiece of interiority, marked by unflinching precision and nimble sympathy. We read Flaubert’s work to develop our ear for his literary innovations, to access his understanding of the sentiments, and to explore his critique of bourgeois life.

Text: Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (tr. Lydia Davis), Penguin Classics, ISBN: 978-0143106494

What Is Called Thinking? (1951-52) is one of the best introductions to Heidegger’s later philosophy. Hannah Arendt considered this lecture course to be as important as Being and Time and “perhaps the most exciting” of all of Heidegger’s books. In clear and often luminous language, he introduces us to the mysterious bond between being and thinking, the common root of philosophy and poetry, and the dangers to our humanity posed by our relentless technological drive. The technological theme traverses Heidegger’s examination of Nietzsche’s concept of the overman (Übermensch). In the wake of two catastrophic world wars, how can we envision man as worthy lord of the earth and its destiny?

Text: Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? (tr. J. Glenn Gray), Harper, ISBN: 978-0060905286

Since its publication in 1726, Gulliver’s Travels has amused, baffled, and—per Swift’s stated aim—“vexed” readers. We work through this distinctly modern take on the age-old story of a traveler adventuring in strange lands among strange people to see how Swift uses humor, fantasy, and satire to raise fundamental questions about the nature of political order, the role of science in society, and the possibilities for human goodness and corruption.

Text: Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Penguin Classics, ISBN: 978-0141439495

In the Groundwork, Kant’s aim is to lay a foundation for his moral philosophy by introducing the concept of the categorical imperative. Kant’s moral theory is revolutionary, in that it breaks with almost the entire preceding Western ethical tradition that situates the goal of an ethical life in happiness. Yet, at the same time, Kant claims that his moral theory does not introduce any novel concepts but only makes explicit what inherently dwells in every human heart (the categorical imperative). We read the Groundwork in its entirety and work through the concept of the categorical imperative, its foundations, and its significance for concrete practical life.

Text: Kant: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (2nd ed., Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy) (ed. Mary Gregor and Jens Timmermann), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN: 978-1107401068

Other editions welcome. All editions include the Akademie pagination for textual navigation.

We read the book of Genesis—the origin stories, the narratives of the patriarchs and matriarchs, and the dramatic interaction between Joseph and his brothers—to explore seminal questions about the human, the divine, the moral, and the familial. What difference, if any, does it make if we regard the world as created rather than as simply existing? What actually happens on Mount Moriah? What can we learn from the passages about Issac and Rebecca? How can we understand the meaning of Jacob’s wrestling with a nameless angel? What does the text tell us about the thinking of Joseph and of Judah—and what, finally, is their relationship to each other? We confront Genesis as a whole and, hopefully, discover the sense in which this book is truly a “beginning,” as its Hebrew name, Bereishis, suggests.

Text: The Bible

Recommended Editions: Jewish Publication Society or Revised Standard Version