At the outset of the 16th century, Europeans tended to dismiss English literature as inferior to continental literary traditions; the educated Englishman was obliged to travel to the continent and speak in other languages in order to culture himself. By the end of the Renaissance, however, some of the greatest works in the English language from Shakespeare's dramas to Thomas More's Utopia had been written. In this course, the student will read and examine these works, situating them within their socio-historical and literary contexts, while attempting to determine how the art of English language and letters came into its own during this dynamic period. (English Literature 202)

There is one thing I can be sure of: I am going to die. But what am I to make of that fact? This course will examine a number of issues that arise once we begin to reflect on our mortality. The possibility that death may not actually be the end is considered. Are we, in some sense, immortal? Would immortality be desirable? Also a clearer notion of what it is to die is examined. What does it mean to say that a person has died? What kind of fact is that? And, finally, different attitudes to death are evaluated. Is death an evil? How? Why? Is suicide morally permissible? Is it rational? How should the knowledge that I am going to die affect the way I live my life?

Emphasis on the analytical reading of lyric poetry in England and the United States. Syllabus usually includes Shakespeare's sonnets, Donne, Keats, Dickinson, Frost, Eliot, Marianne Moore, Lowell, Rich, and Bishop. This subject follows a course of readings in lyric poetry in the English language, tracing the main lines of descent through literary periods from the Renaissance to the modern period and concentrating mostly on English rather than American examples.

Emphasis on the analytical reading of lyric poetry in England and the United States. Syllabus usually includes Shakespeare's sonnets, Donne, Keats, Dickinson, Frost, Eliot, Marianne Moore, Lowell, Rich, and Bishop. This subject is an introduction to poetry as a genre; most of our texts are originally written in English. We read poems from the Renaissance through the 17th and 18th centuries, Romanticism, and Modernism. Focus will be on analytic reading, on literary history, and on the development of the genre and its forms; in writing we attend to techniques of persuasion and of honest evidenced sequential argumentation. Poets to be read will include William Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth, William Wordsworth, John Keats, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, and some contemporary writers.

The metaphysical semi-solipsism is a position that within the semi-idealistic framework of the NSTP (Non – Spatial Thinking Process) theory, ‘I’ and ‘the superhuman mind’ are the only material entities that exist. That is, only my NSTP and the superhuman NSTP/s exist. It is called semi-solipsism because unlike pure/conventional solipsism it asserts the existence of mind, i.e. the superhuman mind, other than one’s own. This position is based on the argument that ‘the non-existence of other non-superhuman minds/NSTPs simply makes the universal design simpler, i.e. it makes the superhuman engine less complicated, since the engine needs no additional intelligence/information to create a variety of specific spatial illusions through multiple (non-superhuman) NSTPs’.

""Reading Poetry" has several aims: primarily, to increase the ways you can become more engaged and curious readers of poetry; to increase your confidence as writers thinking about literary texts; and to provide you with the language for literary description. The course is not designed as a historical survey course but rather as an introductory approach to poetry from various directions – as public or private utterances; as arranged imaginative shapes; and as psychological worlds, for example. One perspective offered is that poetry offers intellectual, moral and linguistic pleasures as well as difficulties to our private lives as readers and to our public lives as writers. Expect to hear and read poems aloud and to memorize lines; the class format will be group discussion, occasional lecture."

The superultramodern (SUM) solipsism is a strong metaphysical semi-solipsistic position constituted of some ideas in superultramodern (SUM) science and philosophy. The first idea or strand is the NSTP (Non – Spatial Thinking Process) theoretical metaphysical semi-solipsism, the position that within the semi-idealistic framework of the NSTP theory ‘I’ and ‘the superhuman mind’ are the only material entities that exist, for the non-existence of other non-superhuman minds simply makes the universal design (i.e. the superhuman engine) simpler, as the engine needs no additional intelligence/information to create a variety of specific spatial illusions through multiple (non-superhuman) NSTPs. The second strand further sees the superhuman design and/or designer, through an astrological framework, as a personal philosophical questioning supermind, the mind which, apparently being highly reasonable, has further no good reason to create tremendous suffering through the existence of other non-superhuman minds which are simply unable to answer its profound philosophical questions. The third strand is a composite of two mutually complementary basic feelings that this miraculous thing called consciousness exists, and that it is particularly ‘I’ who is conscious, and thus other entities, at least other non-superhuman entities, might be unconscious, and that Truth would always be different from how it commonsensically appears to be.