Literature & Creative Writing   

In a world filled with strife, violence, and division, these short stories transcend “national boundaries to comment on the most prevailing aspects of the human condition.” They attempt to redefine the borders of the world we live in by recognizing the conflicting issues of race, language, economy, gender, and ethnicity which separate and limit us. The stories reflect on these beautiful, but at times chaotic and tragic, renditions on the human experience.

Course Materials: One World:A Global Anthology of Short Stories. Edited for New Internationlist by Alan Hughes. ISBN: 978-1-906523-13-8

Cultures shine through the cracks of experience: moments of transformation that illuminate times, places, and peoples. Moments like death. The Japanese tradition dignifies poems that respond with candor and clarity, not despair. These pieces prize brevity and restraint—verse as an ordered response to perfect stillness, long understood as a consummation, not an ending. Emphasizing craft rather than grief, we will see Buddhism, Shinto, ritual honor, and samurai ethics in Japanese culture, past and present, in poetry on the edge.

Course Materials: Japanese Death Poems, ed. Yoel Hoffmann. Approximately $11.00 on Amazon. ISBN13: 978-1462916498. Other materials will be available as PDFs.

This course delves into the novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932), which is considered a masterpiece of dystopian literature because it seemed to predict major historical turns of the 20th century. Members will learn about an imaginary worldstate in which people are engineered to love their society and their own places in it. We will read the novel against a backdrop of questions about happiness, ideal communities, the impact of new technologies on humanity, and whether human freedom is always merely an illusion.

Course Materials:  Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley.