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Literature Classes NYC

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Explore the captivating world of literature in the heart of NYC with a range of classes covering diverse genres, from classic literature and poetry to modern fiction and creative writing, where participants can enhance their understanding and appreciation for the written word.

5 classes have spots left

Personal Histories: Reading Contemporary Memoirs

92nd Street Y @ 1395 Lexington Ave, New York, NY

Explore contemporary memoirs written by authors from diverse social backgrounds. How do authors translate lived experiences of family life, race, gender, religion, work, the arts, love and loss into compelling literary works? How do they chronicle the creation of personal identities as they are shaped by social exclusion, belonging, intimacy and disconnection at various times in their lives? Analyzing both the achievements and the limitations of...

(1061) All levels 18 and older
No upcoming schedules
$188

4 sessions

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The Correspondence: Music and Literature

92nd Street Y @ 1395 Lexington Ave, New York, NY

A unique and unforgettable mixture of performance, writing, and history of classical music led by Elena Baksht, founding director of the Southampton Arts Festival and Music at Lincoln Center, and “one of the most intriguing pianists of her generation.” An electrifying performer and engaging teacher, Baksht’s fascination with literature’s surprising connections to musical performance is contagious. Our knowledge of music can only deepen with...

(1061) Beginner 18 and older
No upcoming schedules
$160

4 sessions

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Coffee and Classics: Twelfth Night

92nd Street Y @ 1395 Lexington Ave, New York, NY

Love, fantasy, folly! Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night combines these volatile ingredients in a rich and amazing mix.

(1061) All levels 18 and older
No upcoming schedules
$192

6 sessions

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Coffee and Classics: Shakespeare's Rom-Coms

92nd Street Y @ 1395 Lexington Ave, New York, NY

Shakespeare began his career with a sequence of romantic comedies: Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. In the first of these plays, the lovers lament that, “the course of true love never did run smooth,” and it certainly goes haywire in all these plays as a result of the love drug in Midsummer and gender disguise in As You Like It and Twelfth Night. Ultimately, however, Puck assures us, “Jack shall have Jill, / Naught...

(1061) All levels 18 and older
No upcoming schedules
$192

6 sessions

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Venus and Adonis

92nd Street Y @ 1395 Lexington Ave, New York, NY

Join charismatic actor and teacher Leo Schaff as he breathes life into Shakespeare’s words, acting out portions of the play and offering illuminating insights into the Bard’s language, plot lines, historical context and eternal relevance, all with a generous sense of humor. Plays were Shakespeare’s thing, but poetry was his medium. The young Bard-of-Avon’s hugely popular narrative poem—all verse, all the way—the racy, comic tale of the...

(1061) All levels 18 and older
No upcoming schedules
$192

6 sessions

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Spies in the Family

92nd Street Y @ 1395 Lexington Ave, New York, NY

At the height of Cold War tensions between the US and the USSR, the Americans had a secret weapon — a Soviet double agent who rose to the rank of general and passed intelligence which most likely averted a nuclear showdown. Codenamed TOPHAT, Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov was a World War II hero turned military intelligence officer who volunteered his services to the United States when he was stationed at the UN in 1961. A principled man motivated...

(1061) All levels 18 and older
No upcoming schedules

It's Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen

92nd Street Y @ 1395 Lexington Ave, New York, NY

From convincing her bosses at The New Yorker to pay for Ancient Greek studies to traveling the sacred way in search of Persephone, “The Comma Queen” Mary Norris delivers an unforgettable account of both her lifelong love affair with words and her solo adventures in the land of olive trees and ouzo. Along the way, Norris explains how the alphabet originated in Greece, makes the case for Athena as a feminist icon, and reveals the surprising...

(1061) All levels 18 and older
No upcoming schedules

Guide to the Haggadah

92nd Street Y @ 1395 Lexington Ave, New York, NY

Get ready for Passover with this three-part program diving into the Haggadah. The Haggadah as we have it today is a complex document that has undergone generations of textual and artistic innovation. We will examine Haggadot from the early medieval period through today. We will see how the document has historically developed both textually and artistically in order to prepare for Seder and better appreciate why we do what we do. PROOF OF COVID-19...

(1061) All levels 18 and older
No upcoming schedules

Signal and Noise: An Introduction to Statistics

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 247 West 37th St, New York, NY

How do numbers relate to the world? What insights can we derive from data? How do we separate signal from noise? This course is an introduction to statistical thinking and its applications to data analysis at a level accessible to a broad audience with no prior statistical background.  We’ll learn and make intuitive the fundamental methods and concepts of data quantification: linear regression, logistic regression, probability distribution,...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

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Kant’s Critical Aesthetics

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 75 Broad St, New York, NY

Art was anything but peripheral to Kant’s philosophical project. In judging a thing to be beautiful, Kant maintained, we bridge “the great gulf” of nature and human freedom, and prepare ourselves to “love something, even nature, without interest”—that is, exercise moral judgment. Immensely influential in its time, the so-called “third Critique” inspired and gave energy to both German Idealism, which attempted to provide a rational...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

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Feminist Science Fiction

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 3009 Broadway, New York, NY

The world is not usually imagined for the benefit of women. What can feminist science fiction tell us about these oppressive arrangements and how the world might be otherwise? What makes a work of science fiction feminist? From utopia to dystopia, satire to space opera, in what ways does science fiction hold up a mirror to difficult realties? This course offers a selective introduction to critical themes in twentieth and twenty-first century...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

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Jorge Luis Borges: Mysticism, Fiction, and Politics

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 612 W 116th St, New York, NY

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 mind, as we proceed, the literary themes and social concerns that pervaded the most formative decade...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

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Camus and The Stranger

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 417 Lafayette St, New York, NY

Camus and The Stranger: From Existentialism to Post-Colonialism When Albert Camus visited New York seventy years ago, he was greeted as one of Europe’s foremost writers and existentialist philosophers. Widely embraced by the city’s literary and cultural establishment, Camus’s newly-translated book, The Stranger, was read as a vehicle for exploring key existentialist themes. The novel, which tells the story of a Frenchman living in Algeria...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

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Playing to Win: an Introduction to Game Theory

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 247 West 37th St, New York, NY

From zero-sum games and the “prisoner’s dilemma” to rational actors and the Nash equilibrium, game theory has grown from a bold conjecture into a deeply influential mode of analysis in political science, economics, psychology, business, mathematics, and even military strategy. Based on a theory of simple card games developed by John Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, game theory seeks to use these game situations to model human, computer, and...

(29) Beginner 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

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The Bible as Literature: Narrative, Politics, & History

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 612 W 116th St, New York, NY

The Bible is a wonderfully comprehensive collection of stories: a parade of heroes and villains, royals and peasants, dysfunctional families and the truest of filial loyalties.  Its texts span genres from poetry to novella, short story to historical epic, legalistic writing to satire, and instructional manual to the confessional. However, this simple fact of the Bible’s literary quality and variety often gets lost in discussions of authorship...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

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Aristotle and the Poets: Truth, Fiction and Tragedy

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 247 West 37th St, New York, NY

Aristotle’s Poetics offers an account of imitative art and its pleasures that stands at the origins of Western aesthetic theory. In response to Plato’s critique of poetry as twice-removed from reality, Aristotle defends—and theorizes—imitation as an essential component of human education and of the “discovery of form in things.” Fiction is false in its particulars, but somehow true in its universality. What does drama teach us that history...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

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Crisis and Capitalism

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 275 Madison Ave, New York, NY

Do capitalist societies have an inherent tendency toward economic, social, and political crises?  Political economists have, over the course of the past 250 years, offered different frameworks to understand the existence of crises within capitalism: from Adam Smith’s “general glut” (when production exceeds demand) to Marx’s belief that the contradictions inherent in capitalism will lead to its eventual demise and the Keynesian attempt...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

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On the Heights of Despair: an Introduction to E.M. Cioran

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 200 East 38th Street, New York, NY

Delve into the mind of philosopher Emil Cioran, as he explores themes of despair, doubt, and skepticism in a world without God. Join this thought-provoking course and discover Cioran's aphoristic style and its connection to his unconventional philosophy. Explore his life, influences, and the meaning of existence in this engaging exploration of a philosopher of unremitting despair.

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$335

4 sessions

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A Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing: An Introduction to Marx

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 30 Irving Pl, New York, NY

In the mid-nineteenth century, a young Karl Marx wrote, in the form of a published open letter to Arnold Ruge: “But if the designing of the future and the proclamation of ready-made solutions for all time is not our affair, then we realize all the more clearly what we have to accomplish in the present—I am speaking of a ruthless criticism of everything existing, ruthless in two senses: The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions,...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$335

4 sessions

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Literature in Irish: Examining “Scothscéalta”

Irish Arts Center @ 500 W 52nd St, New York, NY

Pádraic Ó Conaire was the first Irish language writer to portray the human condition in a raw and honest manner. The title of this collection, “Scothscéalta,” means “Choice (or Best) Stories.” One short story will be discussed and analyzed each week in terms of themes, style and language. Pre-requisite: This course is aimed at intermediate and advanced level students. The classes will be conducted entirely through the medium...

(51) Intermediate 18 and older
No upcoming schedules
$170

8 sessions

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