Comedy, that most elastic literary and performance mode, skewers artifice, topples authority, and reverses expectations, not with the fatal outcomes of tragedy but with laughter and festivity. This class examines both deep roots and current forms of comedy, with a particular focus on comic insubordination. And food.
We will revel in Greek, Roman, and Shakespearean drama; explore Aphra Behn’s eighteenth-century feminist rakes and sexual adventurers in The Rover; investigate social satire in Jane Austen, Herman Melville, and Oscar Wilde; peek under the covers of small-town family life in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home; and probe the uneasy relationship between farce and romantic love, violence and redemptive humor, satire and festivity in comic art. Discussion will draw on examples of popular and contemporary forms, including film and sketch comedy.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "The Comedy of Errors" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

This course focuses on an exploration of the role that communication plays in the work of the contemporary engineering and science professional. Emphasis is placed on analyzing how composition and publication contribute to work management and knowledge production, as well as the "how-to" aspects of writing specific kinds of documents in a clear style. Topics include: communication as organizational process, electronic modes such as e-mail and the Internet, the informational and social roles of specific document forms, writing as collaboration, the writing process, the elements of style, methods of oral presentation, and communication ethics. Case studies used as the basis for class discussion and some writing assignments. Several short documents, a longer report or article, and a short oral presentation are required.

This collection of resources covers the fundamentals of literature and encourages critical and thoughtful responses to a variety of writings, from short stories, poetry, and music to case studies and academic essays. There is a comprehensive guide to the basic building blocks of writing, with terms, discussion points, video examples, and pop-culture relevancy. A link to each writing is included, with works ranging from Sophocles to Bono. 

This 6th Grade literacy unit focuses on the Required Core Novel The Skin I’m In , by Sharon G. Flake. This unit explores the confusing journey to finding identity as a middle school aged student. The complex identities of five characters from the novel, Maleeka, Char, Mrs. Saunders, Caleb and John-John, are analyzed with multiple supplemental texts. The project for the students includes a daily “Identity Journal,” in which they analyze the characters using text evidence from both the novel and supplemental texts, and then compare these with what they are feeling or seeing within themselves. The unit culminates with a drawing of the student alongside the character the most identify with. Students present their journals with the drawings.

One of the significant Irish poets and scholars of our time, Maire MacEntee, discusses the influences that led to her becoming a poet. (27 min)

Host Harry Kreisler speaks with Tariq Ali, a British-Pakistani journalist, novelist, playwright, publisher, filmmaker, and renowned social critic about Islam, empire, and the left. (57 min)

Host Harry Kreisler welcomes Pulitzer Prize winning author Neil Sheehan, who reflects on the Vietnam War through the prism of American soldier John Paul Vann. (60 min)

Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Annabel Patterson, Professor Emeritus of English, Yale University for a discussion of her career as a literary scholar. The discussion focuses on the challenges of understanding literature in its historical and social context. Her work on censorship, Shakespeare, and her current research on the use of words in the American political dialogue are some of the topics addressed in the conversation. (59 minutes)

Host Harry Kreisler welcomes historian and novelist Michael Oren for a discussion of the search for truth in his historical studies and in his novels. He reflects on the skills and temperament required to do history and fiction focusing on his study of the six day war in the Middle East and his novel Reunion. (54 min)

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "Coriolanus" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

In this video author Patrick Gale shares his thoughts on madness and creativity during the Madness and Literature Network Seminar in 2009. For related videocasts see those presented by Professor Paul Crawford and Paul Sayer.

Presentation delivered May 2009.

Suitable for: Undergraduate study and Community Education

Patrick Gale, Author.

Patrick Gale was born on the Isle of Wight in 1962, where his father was prison governor at Camp Hill prison. Later the family moved to London. He boarded at The Pilgrim's School, where he was a chorister, then went to Winchester College before reading English at Oxford University. He did a series of odd jobs to support his writing before becoming a full-time novelist, moving to Cornwall in 1987. He is the author of several novels, and also writes short stories and novellas. He has written one book of non-fiction, on the American novelist Armistead Maupin, and also writes book reviews for The Daily Telegraph.

His first two novels, Ease and The Aerodynamics of Pork, were published on the same day in 1986. The Facts of Life (1995) tells the story of Edward Pepper, an exile saved from Nazi Germany in the Kindertransport, and Tree Surgery for Beginners (1998) is about Laurence Frost, an inarticulate tree surgeon. A Sweet Obscurity (2003) is told from the alternating viewpoints of four separate characters. Friendly Fire (2003) draws on the author's own experience of a late 1970s adolescence, and Notes from an Exhibition (2007) is set in Cornwall, exploring the effects of mental illness on artist Rachel Kelly and her family.

Important Copyright Information:

You are free to copy, distribute and transmit this video as long as you credit the original author. The video is also available on YouTube

In this video author Paul Sayer shares his thoughts on madness and creativity during the Madness and Literature Network Seminar in 2009. For related videocasts see those presented by Professor Paul Crawford and Patrick Gale.

Presentation delivered May 2009.

Suitable for: Undergraduate study and Community Education

Paul Sayer, Author.

Paul Sayer is a former psychiatric nurse whose first novel The Comforts of Madness (1988) won the Constable Trophy, the Whitbread First Novel prize, and the Whitbread Book of the Year award. His five subsequent books include The Absolution Game (1992), Booker Prize 'long-listed', and Men in Rage (1999) published by Bloomsbury. His work has been translated into ten languages, and he has been the recipient of a number of scholarships, including a Society of Authors travel award and, for 2007/8, a Wingate Scholarship to support the writing of a new novel.

Paul has tutored for Arvon, and has numerous credits for reviews and features in: the Sunday Times, Times, Independent, Literary Review, Time Out, Nursing Standard, Nursing Times, and many more. Psychiatry and psychological sciences remain an interest.

'The Comforts of Madness is surely sad, but enthralling in its excellence. Sayer's style is understated and surehanded.'- New York Newsday

Important Copyright Information:

You are free to copy, distribute and transmit this video as long as you credit the original author. The video is also available on YouTube

Through what lens do we identify a nation, its leaders, and its people? Can those of us outside of a select culture impartially examine and embrace a nation and its constituents through multiple lenses such that we objectively identify a country and its people—many of whose descendants live within American shores? How do we enlighten future generations to become thinkers who empathize, communicate, and interact with diverse cultures, ultimately helping them develop working relationships with diverse people within our country and ever-expanding global community? How can understanding identity and collective consciousness serve as a unifying force for a community, a nation, and the world? By immersing students in hands-on research activities, engaging discourse with entrepreneurs and individuals from diverse cultures, and more, we can perhaps evoke positive change in this regards. “Cuba! Identity Revealed” serves as a proposed “discovery prototype” to achieve this end. Using the country of Cuba as a springboard, young learners will go beyond textbook knowledge, media images, and sweeping generalizations to better understand and constructively embrace diverse cultures that exist both within and beyond America’s shores.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "Cymbeline" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

The course is an introduction to Dante and his cultural milieu through a critical reading of the Divine Comedy and selected minor works (Vita nuova, Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia, Epistle to Cangrande). An analysis of Dante's autobiography, the Vita nuova, establishes the poetic and political circumstances of the Comedy's composition. Readings of Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise seek to situate Dante's work within the intellectual and social context of the late Middle Ages, with special attention paid to political, philosophical and theological concerns. Topics in the Divine Comedy explored over the course of the semester include the relationship between ethics and aesthetics; love and knowledge; and exile and history.

This subject offers a broad survey of texts (both literary and philosophical) drawn from the Western tradition and selected to trace the immediate intellectual antecedents and some of the implications of the ideas animating Darwin's revolutionary On the Origin of Species. Darwin's text, of course, is about the mechanism that drives the evolution of life on this planet, but the fundamental ideas of the text have implications that range well beyond the scope of natural history, and the assumptions behind Darwin's arguments challenge ideas that go much further back than the set of ideas that Darwin set himself explicitly to question - ideas of decisive importance when we think about ourselves, the nature of the material universe, the planet that we live upon, and our place in its scheme of life. In establishing his theory of natural selection, Darwin set himself, rather self-consciously, to challenge a whole way of thinking about these things. The main focus of attention will be Darwin's contribution to the so-called "argument from design" - the notion that innumerable aspects of the world (and most particularly the organisms within it) display features directly analogous to objects of human design and, since design implies a designer, that an intelligent, conscious agency must have been responsible for their organization and creation. Previously, it had been argued that such features must have only one of two ultimate sources - chance or conscious agency. Darwin proposed and elaborated a third source, which he called Natural Selection, an unconscious agency capable of outdoing the most complex feats of human intelligence.
The course of study will not only examine the immediate inspiration for this idea in the work of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus and place Darwin's Origin and the theory of Natural Selection in the history of ensuing debate, but it will also touch upon related issues.

Humans are social animals; social demands, both cooperative and competitive, structure our development, our brain and our mind. This course covers social development, social behaviour, social cognition and social neuroscience, in both human and non-human social animals. Topics include altruism, empathy, communication, theory of mind, aggression, power, groups, mating, and morality. Methods include evolutionary biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, social psychology and anthropology.

These resources will allow you to investigate the key themes of Dickens's novels alongside original source material from the British Library. Literary manuscripts, newspapers, letters, workhouse menus and many more fascinating collection items will help students open up the social, cultural and political context in which Dickens was writing. This website includes performances by Simon Callow and discussions by Professor of English, John Mullan, filmed at the Charles Dickens Museum, London.

In the context of an 11th-grade English classroom, this unit will focus explicitly on the complications of “literature” and “identity.” It explores the tensions that exist in these words themselves: the distinct and intensely personal lived experience of literature that at the same time touches on the universal elements of humanity; the idea that identity is a signification of the self, yet at the same time the signification conditions the identity it signifies. This unit hopes to challenge students with questions that they may not have answers to as they study a series of short stories with a focus on voice: where literature and identity converge. Ideally students complete this unit with a sensitivity to these tensions and the confidence to engage with them with whatever text they encounter or create.