Love, Literature & Destruction

What is poetry, and what is it good for? Today, poetry is often pronounced dead. Yet at the same time, we remain, to cite the New York Times, “poetry curious.” We sense, as Aimé Césaire sensed, that poetry encompasses some “greater feeling” that goes uncaptured by scientific classification and explanation. For Audre Lorde, poetry is...

Is the novel an intrinsically modern form? Are prose works like Satyricon, Daphnis and Chloe, and The Golden Ass actually ancient novels? These narratives of ancient Greece and Rome offer a kaleidoscopic array of fictions: pastoral tales of erotic exploration; fierce satires of urban life and aristocratic rapacity; fantastical accounts...

Society and the Spirit of Capitalism: an Introduction to Max Weber Max Weber sought to explain nothing less than the emergence of the modern world and the direction in which it was headed. A trailblazer (along with Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim) of the modern discipline of sociology, Weber brought to bear empirically driven methods of comparative analysis...

Jorge Luis Borges’ fiction is uniquely powerful for its captivating amalgam of political, mystical, and metaphysical themes. In this course, an introduction to Borges’ most canonical works, we’ll read his great short story collections Ficciones and The Aleph, as well as the essay collection Other Inquisitions—bearing in...

Pornography is one of humanity’s oldest, and most enduring artifacts. Variously celebrated and demonized, it has decorated sumptuous palaces and been furtively sold under pain of arrest. In the modern United States, it is kept studiously out of sight, and yet is simultaneously omnipresent and accessible in its most explicit forms with a simple click...

Emigrating from the European periphery to its intellectual center, Julia Kristeva exploded like a bomb onto the insular world of French theory. Her first book, Revolution in Poetic Language, put forth a wholly new understanding of human communication—insisting on the non-linguistic rhythmic dimension that undergirds all language. Her emphasis...

Theorizing Repression: From Psychoanalysis to Counterinsurgency Theory “The individual’s dangerous desire for aggression,” theorized Sigmund Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents, can only be “disarmed” by the establishment of “an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.” For some, Freud’s...

In recent years, there has been unprecedented growth in the visibility and sheer number of people who identify with a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth. Trans life and, with it, a whole world of trans culture—aesthetics, style, taste—has broken from the margins into the mainstream. This new generation of “gender subversives”...

While contemporary political discourse is often characterized by heated discussions of liberalism or fascism, socialism or “populism”, the broad category of “conservative” thought seems to take a back seat. This despite its enduring relevance not only for understanding political history and the history of political thought, but also as an analytical...

Part of the Plants, Cuisine and Culture series, Indian Cuisine with Simon Majumdar online program is presented in partnership with Franklin Park Conservatory, Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, Missouri Botanical Garden, and Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens. Plants are intimately linked to our cultural identities and food traditions. Plants tell...