Free Literature Courses

The course will be organized around various attempts to reinterpret the Judeo/Christian God, and to determine in what sense, if at all, such a God is still a living God.

This course will compare and contrast the Greek, Medieval, and modern worlds, as reflected in their greatest literature...

In "The American Novel Since 1945" students will study a wide range of works from 1945 to the present.

Each lecture in this series focuses on a single play by Shakespeare, and employs a range of different approaches to try to understand a central critical question about it.

Most human lives contain major turning points: crises that transform an individual’s future development...

The course facilitates a close reading of Don Quixote in the artistic and historical context of renaissance and baroque Spain. Students are also expected to read four of Cervantes' Exemplary Stories, Cervantes' Don Quixote: A Casebook, and J.H. Elliott's Imperial Spain.

This course examines major works by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, exploring their interconnections on three analytic scales...

The Romantic period witnessed the birth of major new forms of writing and thinking that are still relevant today. The social transition from an age of commerce and colonialism to an era of industry and imperialism radically changed the entire surface of the world.

Gain an better understanding and appreciation for the works of T.S. Eliot, one of the most important poets of the twentieth century.

This class is a study of Milton's poetry, with attention paid to his literary sources, his contemporaries, his controversial prose, and his decisive influence on the course of English poetry.