Literature Classes in Nashville, TN

Delve into some of the best short novels of the 20th century. Spend the first weeks of summer delving into some of the best short novels. 

What does it mean to be human in the world today? Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) is a provocative treatise on what it means to live on earth and share the world in common. Her study, originally intended to be titled Amor Mundi (Love of the World), investigates the central activities of human life—labor, work, action—and their corresponding...

Online Class with guest lecturers Professor Miles Grier and Dr. Farah Karim-Cooper Join Shakespeare scholar Richard McCoy for an examination of the racial politics in three of his great tragedies: Titus Andronicus, Othello, and Antony and Cleopatra. Professor Miles Grier of Queens College and Dr. Farah Karim-Cooper of Shakespeare’s Globe will...

Join Colm Tóibín, celebrated author of Brooklyn and professor at Columbia University, for a course on three Irish writers and three American writers. The divided self and the delighted eye—this course explores the idea of internal tension in a text, literature in which there is an argument enfolding, an argument that animates the text; as well...

What is poetry and what is it good for? These questions have long haunted practitioners and readers of this “beautiful and pointless” art, to quote the contemporary critic David Orr. But “beautiful and pointless” were not always the terms of the debate. On the contrary, these questions about what poetry is and what it does mean something profoundly...

How are we to understand loneliness today? It appears that we are facing a mass epidemic of loneliness—one perhaps exacerbated by virological pandemic of COVID-19. Britain has appointed a Minister of Loneliness to counter rising rates of isolation. Approximately 20-43 percent of American adults over the age of 60 experience “frequent or intense...

Ovid begins his Metamorphoses, “My soul would speak of bodies changed into new forms,” and it is the great theme of physical transformation that unites the poem’s many myths: humans becomes animals and plants, and vice versa; humans becomes stones and constellations; and humans change their sex. No poem from antiquity has so influenced Western...

“It is human to have compassion for the suffering.” So begins Giovanni Boccaccio’s extraordinary classic, the Decameron, a collection of one hundred short stories written in 1353, just five years after the Great Plague of 1348 that claimed millions of lives throughout Europe and more than half of the population of Boccaccio’s hometown,...