Events, Classes, and Seminars

Vanity Fair (“A Novel without a Hero”), by William Makepeace Thackeray (1848), belongs on the same shelf with other towering novels of the Victorian age: Bleak House, Middlemarch, Jane Eyre,

Novels of ghosts and haunted landscapes can open the door to discussions of sociology and repression, trauma, and the cathartic function of horror. In this seminar, we will examine themes

The Symposium by Plato asks: what is love? It is the story of a banquet in classical Athens, attended by Socrates and his friends, at which each person tells a

The American novelist Walker Percy described The Brothers Karamazov as “maybe the greatest novel of all time . . . . almost prophesies and prefigures everything—all the bloody mess and

What is a border? Who does it serve? Who gets to draw it? This seminar will interrogate our understanding of the border as a static entity by witnessing its creation,

Proust’s magnum opus is often considered to be the greatest novel of the 20th century. It richly repays the careful attention it demands, and becomes unforgettable. First-time readers, however, may

The Faust Legend takes up the question of selling your soul to the devil for magical success in this world. This Delve seminar looks at the legend in three famous

Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) was maybe the greatest short story writer in English that you might not have read. In this Delve, we will read the two dozen stories she wrote

In this Delve, we will read Portuguese Nobel-laureate José Saramago’s breathtaking novel, Blindness (1995), focusing in particular on the concept of “community.” The novel posits the trope of community as

The Wild West has always been a fiction. The heroic cowboy settling the frontier is a myth. The Western novels of the mid-20th century rewrote genocide & colonialism to justify the existence of the United States. As a needed response, The Anti-Western works to undermine this false history by complexifying & subverting the tropes of