New York University
The American Novel Today Fall 2024 LITR1-CE 9270 Wednesday: 1:00 PM- 2:40 PM; Thursday 10:00 AN-11:40 AM; Thursday: 1:00 PM- 2:40 PM Margaret Boe Birns
The American Novel Today Fall 2024 LITR1-CE 9270 Wednesday: 1:00 PM- 2:40 PM; Thursday 10:00 AN-11:40 AM; Thursday: 1:00 PM- 2:40 PM Margaret Boe Birns
Discuss major new work by today’s top writers, including emerging novelists, award-winners, and established favorites, all of whom are central to today's cultural conversation. We will investigate a variety of inventive narrative strategies, explore the psychology of numerous fascinating characters, and examine important topics within a context of changing times, changing lives and a changing world. Together we will explore: A father-son road trip to Mt. Rushmore, , all those who lived in a single cabin in the American north woods across the centuries; immigrant Jews, African Americans and the mysteries and surprises of life in a small town in Pennsylvania; Gen X, marriage and the pursuit of happiness in the North Shore of Chicago; the same day, the same family in three different years in a Brooklyn brownstone; two American wives in Saigon in 1963 and sixty years after; summer stock on a beautiful lake and taking stock in a beautiful orchard in bucolic Michigan; a thrilling and ingenious retelling of Huckleberry Finn; a centuries-spanning epic of a Native American family; a young Asian-American chef who prepares decadent dishes for a secretive millionaire in an exclusive a mountain top safe haven. Readings: Ann Patchett, Tom Lake, Richard Ford, Be Mine; Daniel Mason, North Woods; James McBride, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store; Nathan Hill, Wellness; Percival Everett, James; Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars; Michael Cunningham, Day; Alice McDermott, Absolution; Pam Zhang, The Land of Milk and Honey. Students should read Ann Patchett, Tom Lake for the first class.
Leo Tolstoy: The Hero is Truth Margaret Boe Birns Fall 2024 LITR1-CE 9031- Course Meets Every Three Weeks Five Sessions Monday 1:00-2:40 PM
This course will study five works of fiction by a giant of world literature. We will explore his identity as a social reformer, moral thinker and a novelist with deep insight into the human character, families, war, peace, love, passion and especially truth, something Tolstoy suggested was always the true hero of his stories. We will discuss his two masterpieces of realist fiction that led to his reputation as creating not simply works of art, but “pieces of life,” and which led Isaak Babel to comment that, if the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy. His two greatest novels will feature one of literature’s most passionate and tragic romances, families unhappy each in their own way, peasants, aristocrats, generals, the drawings rooms of St Petersburg, the killing fields of Borodino, everyday people and Napoleon himself, and will explore philosophical issues such as chance, fate, freedom, coincidence, predestination, and spiritual transformation. We will also read his third and final novel that explores Tolstoy as he was best known in his time—as a sage and social thinker who inspired such leaders as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, up to today’s champions of human rights. Readings include Hadji Murad, War and Peace (two sessions) Anna Karenina (two sessions), and Resurrection. (Guest Lecture, Nicholas Birns) Students should read War and Peace, Volumes One and Two for the first class.
The New School
20th-Century American Short Story Classics Asynchronous online course
In this class we will examine the way in which the sensibility of the 20th-century American writer found in the short story a highly congenial medium, exerting a major influence on the development of this genre, from the innovations of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway to a second golden age in the last half of the 20th century. As our stories move from Minnesota to Mississippi, from Georgia to New York City, from the fantastic to the “dirty real,” we will especially examine the way the short story produces a moment of truth, rearranging our perceptions, and bringing new insights; through its very brevity it will bring an overflow of revelation, illumination, or feeling. Although now considered classics, these stories will also still address relevant modern problems and modern situations, featuring essential American authors such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Joyce Carol Oates, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, James Baldwin, Richard Ford, James Alan McPherson, Bernard Malamud, Ann Beattie, Ursula K. LeGuin.
Fantasy and Wonder: Andersen, Carroll, Wilde, Rosseti Asynchronous online course
This course will examine the work of four extraordinary and original authors whose enchanting stories teach all ages much about life, the imagination, and the mysteries of the human heart. Deploying a double articulation that reaches both child and adult, these authors wrote fantasies that, like dreams, take us beyond the conventional idiom of ordinary reality into worlds of wonder which allow us to explore deep-rooted wishes, needs and fears. We will examine how each of our highly sensitive authors confounded the categories that license sexual normality, valued the eccentric and the singular over the conventional and the standardized, and encouraged the development of a social conscience either through satire or social criticism. Each author deployed fantasy in a revolutionary way as a correction of an overly puritanical, utilitarian Victorian mentality that tended to be deeply suspicious of the imagination; and, because all magic tales depend on the experience of miraculous transformations, their stories are also vehicles for spiritual exploration. We will read a selection of tales by the innovative Hans Christian Andersen; Lewis Carroll's brilliant Alice in Wonderland; Oscar Wilde’s strange and beautiful fairy tales, and Christina Rossetti’s narrative of forbidden fruit and female desire, Goblin Market.