August 2019
A Summer of Further Discontent: Noir Fiction and the City
This summer our noir group will visit our old stomping grounds of Los Angeles but will begin our summer of more discontent with Narcopolis, set in Mumbai, then after two stops in L.A. go off to Glasgow before dipping south to finish our summer in Paris with the soon-to-be-published Nada.
Find out more »September 2019
Les Temps Modernes: The Early Decades
This class will examine the first decades of its existence, when such important works as Sartre’s What is Literature appeared in it, as well as the first installments of Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. It will focus on its political positions, as Sartre first attempted to set up a third-way party...
Find out more »Earth in Crisis: Staying With the Trouble
This reading group will consider how climate activists and critical thinkers can maintain equilibrium and avoid despair by “staying with the trouble” —Donna Haraway’s phrase for living through planetary chaos and struggling alongside our fellow human and nonhuman beings.
Find out more »October 2019
Forewarned is Forearmed: Graphic Novels in Late Capitalism
The innocent and marginalized that seem destined to be lost in the history of a world cold to their existence and beyond their ability to affect, would get their days back and the publishing world had an explosion of creative expression by some of the biggest names in comic book history.The Pulitzer Prize winning Maus by Art Spiegelman, Frank Miller’s gritty The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore’s prophetic V for Vendetta, Will Eisner’s semi-biographical A Contract with God and the grim post-nuclear When the Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs are some of the books this forward-looking and exciting 8-week class will read, consider and discuss.
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