1.
Why Literature — Civilization and Its Discontents
2.
Oedipus the King and the Nature of Greek Tragedy
3.
Fate and Free Will — Reading the Signs in Oedipus
4.
Self-Making vs. Self-Discovery in Oedipus
5.
The Interpretive Afterlife of Oedipus
6.
Shakespeare's Othello — Tragedy of Marriage and State
7.
Poison in the Ear, or the Dismantling of Othello
8.
Rethinking Othello — Race, Gender and Subjectivity
9.
French Theater and Moliere's Comedy of Vices
10.
Tartuffe and Varieties of Imposture
11.
Religious Hypocrisy — Beyond Comedy
12.
Georg Büchner — Physician, Revolutionary, Playwright
13.
Woyzeck the Proletarian Murderer — "Unaccommodated Man"
14.
Woyzeck and Visionary Theater
15.
Strindberg's Father — Patriarchy in Trouble
16.
Marriage — Theatrical Agon or Darwinian Struggle?
17.
The Father — From Theater of Power to Power of Theater
18.
Beckett's Godot — Chaplinesque or Post-Nuclear?
19.
Beckett and the Comedy of Undoing
20.
Godot Absent — Didi and Gogo Present
21.
Study of Literature — Approaches, Encounters, Departures
22.
Shakespeare's Sonnets — The Glory of Poetry
23.
The Shape of Love and Death in Shakespeare's Sonnets
24.
Innocence and Experience in William Blake
25.
Blakean Fables of Desire
26.
Blake — Visionary Poet
27.
Whitman and the Making of an American Bard
28.
"Myself" as Whitman's Nineteenth-Century American Hero
29.
Form and Flux, Openness and Anxiety in Whitman's Poetry
30.
Emily Dickinson — The Prophetic Voice From the Margins
31.
Dickinson and the Poetry of Consciousness
32.
Dickinson — Death and Beyond
33.
Baudelaire — The Setting of the Romantic Sun
34.
Baudelaire's Poetry of Modernism and Metropolis
35.
Robert Frost — The Wisdom of the People
36.
Frost — The Darker View
37.
Wallace Stevens and the Modernist Movement
38.
Stevens and the Post-Romantic Imagination
39.
Adrienne Rich and the Poetry of Protest
40.
Rich's Project — Diving Into the Wreck of Western Culture
41.
The Lives of the Word — Reading Today
42.
Chretien de Troyes' Yvain — Growing Up in the Middle Ages
43.
Yvain's Theme — Ignorant Armies Clash by Night
44.
The Picaresque Novel — Satire, Filth and Hustling
45.
Francisco Quevedo's Swindler — The Word on the Street
46.
Daniel Defoe's Plain Style and the New World Order
47.
Moll Flanders and the Self-Made Woman
48.
Matter and Spirit in Defoe
49.
Dickens — The Novel as Moral Institution
50.
Pip's Progress — From Blacksmith to Snob and Back
51.
Riddles of Identity in Great Expectations
52.
Charlotte Brontë and the Bildungsroman
53.
Jane Eyre — Victorian Bad Girl Makes Good
54.
The Madwoman in the Attic — 19th Century Bills Coming Due
55.
Melville's "Bartleby" and the Genesis of Character
56.
"Bartleby" — Christ on Wall Street?
57.
Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis" — Sacrifice or Power Game?
58.
Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" — The Writing Machine
59.
Faulkner's "The Bear" — Stories of White and Black
60.
"The Bear" — American Myth or American History?
61.
Tracking the Bear, or Learning to Read
62.
Alice Walker's Celie — The Untold Story
63.
Ideology as Vision in the Color Purple
64.
Reconceiving Center and Margin