COML 2020

Great Books: The Great Short Works

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2016-2017.

What is a "classic"? What is "contemporary"? How did we get "here" from "there"? Where are we heading now? Extending from the Renaissance to the present, this course will focus on texts from Europe and the Americas that have played a pivotal role in shaping our increasingly global understanding of "World Literature." Exploring literature's enduring value in the 21st century, the Age of Twitter and Instagram, with its pervasive emphasis on brevity and speed of communication, we will pay special attention to great short works that have had an outsized impact on the ways literature, culture, history, philosophy, language, economics, politics, and technology continue to intersect and evolve. Authors include Shakespeare, Molière, Goethe, Blake, Wordsworth, Büchner, Balzac, Poe, Baudelaire, Marx, Freud, Breton, Nietzsche, Borges, Bolaño, Walcott, and Rankine. 

When Offered Spring.

Distribution Category (LA-AS)

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