Understanding literature and life

Why literature : civilization and its discontents

Oedipus the King and the nature of Greek tragedy

Fate and free will

Self-making vs. self-discovery in Oedipus

The interpretive afterlife of Oedipus

Shakespeare's Othello

Poison in the ear, or the dismantling of Othello

Rethinking Othello

French theater and Moliere's comedy of vices

Tartuffe and varieties of imposture

Religious hypocrisy

Georg Buchner : physician, revolutionary, playwright

Woyzeck the proletarian murderer : "unaccommodated man"

Woyzeck and visionary theater

Strindberg's Father

Marriage : theatrical agon or Darwinian struggle?

The Father : from theater of power to power of theater

Beckett's Godot

Beckett and the comedy of undoing

Godot absent

Study of literature

Shakespeare's Sonnets : the glory of poetry

The shape of love and death in Shakespeare's Sonnets

Innocence Innocence and Experience in William Blake

Blakean fables of desire

Blake : visionary poet

Whitman and the making of an American bard

"Myself" as Whitman's nineteenth century American hero

Form and flux, openness and anxiety in Whitman's poetry

Emily Dickinson : the prophetic voice from the margins

Dickinson and the poetry of consciousness

Dickinson : death and beyond

Baudelaire : the setting of the romantic sun

Baudelaire's poetry of modernism and metropolis

Robert Frost : the wisdom of the people

Frost : the darker view

Wallace Stevens and the Stevens and the modernist movement

Stevens and the post-romantic imagination

Adrienne Rich and the poetry of protest

Rich's project : diving into the wreck of Western culture

The lives of the word : reading today

Chretien de Troyes' Yvain : growing up in the Middle Ages

Yvain's theme : ignorant armies clash by night

The Picaresque novel : satire, filth and hustling

Francisco Quevedo's Swindler : the word on the street

Daniel Defoe's plain style and the new world order

Moll Flanders and the self-made woman

Matter and spirit in Defoe

Dickens : the novel as moral institution

Pip's progress : from blacksmith to snob and back

Riddles of identity in Great Expectations

Charlotte Bronte and the Bildungsroman

Jane Eyre : Victorian bad girl makes good

The madwoman in the attic

Melville's "Bartleby" and the genesis of character

"Bartleby" : Christ on Wall Street?

Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis" : sacrifice or power game?

Kafka's "In the penal colony" : the writing machine

Faulkner's "The Bear" : stories of black and white

"The Bear" : American myth or American history?

Tracking the bear, or learning to read

Alice Walker's Celie : the untold story

Ideology as vision in The Color Purple

Reconceiving center and margin.