Literature Classes in Washington, DC

American Populism: History, Democracy, and Agrarian Revolt In recent decades, populism in the U.S. has most visibly been a right-wing phenomenon—from Pat Buchanan to the Tea Party to Trump—often overlapping politically with plutocracy and white nationalism. However, the largest populist movement in American history, the People’s Party of...

The arrival of Jacques Derrida’s work lit the American intellectual landscape ablaze. For many American academics and critics in the 1970s and thereafter, the charismatic Algerian-born Derrida was the face of “French Theory,” and virtually synonymous with postmodernism itself. With his enigmatic prose and seemingly esoteric approach to language,...

State, Power, and Democratic Socialism: an Introduction to Nicos Poulantzas “One thing is certain, socialism will be democratic or it will not be at all.” So wrote the Greek Marxist and theoretician Nicos Poulantzas, just a year before his untimely death. Poulantzas’s work, newly rediscovered by sections of the U.S. left, constitutes a highly...

Culture, Feeling, and Capital: An Introduction to Raymond Williams Activist, critic, and key figure in the development of cultural studies, Raymond Williams was among the most influential radical intellectuals of the 20th century. The concepts and approaches he developed or helped to popularize—“structures of feeling,” “cultural materialism,”...

From the start, Western philosophy, literature, and medicine have been preoccupied—and haunted—with the figure of the mad and the idea of madness. What lies at the root of seemingly strange irruptions of emotion, speech, and erratic behavior? Do they arise by happenstance, or are they symptoms of disturbances in the body, the mind, the psyche,...

Join James Shapiro, the Larry Miller Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, for a seminar on Shakespeare’s long narrative poems: “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece,” both of which he composed during a plague outbreak in June 1592, when the theatres were closed for nearly six months, and “A Lover’s...

Spanish Tutoring: Introduction to Spanish Conversation (Grades 8-12) In this session students can get help  cleaning up any grammatical confusion and move towards fluency.   We will also analyze some samples of Spanish literature.   No more than 3 students per class.   No text book required, however, if you have...

Spanish Tutoring: Intermediate and Advanced Spanish Conversation (Grades 8-12) In this session students can get help  cleaning up any grammatical confusion and move towards fluency.   We will also analyze some samples of Spanish literature.   No more than 3 students per class.   No text book required, however,...

The How to Eat Cake: Cunnilingus Workshop is an oral sex workshop that helps participants learn their way around down there and discover the best techniques for giving toe-curling cunnilingus! Five Things You Need to Know About The Class: Class sizes are small and cover the female sexual anatomy, tools, tips, techniques and tricks. All participants...

Due to COVID-19, all scheduled classes will be held Virtually. The perfect happy hour or after-brunch alternative, these workshops are a unique experience that is tastefully racy, fun, and educational! The Blow His Mind! Oral Sex Workshop helps participants learn the best techniques for giving mind-blowing fellatio, and quickly! No more achy jaws!...

Jacques Lacan always insisted that he was a thoroughgoing Freudian—perhaps the most orthodox Freudian of them all. A larger-than-life provocateur, Lacan’s oracular lectures and clinical innovations (including the notorious “short session”) ultimately led to his excommunication from the International Psychoanalytic Association. Yet, despite...

Compared over the course of her life to Marlene Dietrich, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Rimbaud, a sphinx, a she-wolf, a “foreigner on earth,” and a hurricane, the Jewish Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector moved in mystery. The author of nine novels and a large body of short stories, journalism, and children’s...