Why literature : civilization and its discontents
Oedipus the King and the nature of Greek tragedy
Self-making vs. self-discovery in Oedipus
The interpretive afterlife of Oedipus
Poison in the ear, or the dismantling of Othello
French theater and Moliere's comedy of vices
Tartuffe and varieties of imposture
Georg Buchner : physician, revolutionary, playwright
Woyzeck the proletarian murderer : "unaccommodated man"
Woyzeck and visionary theater
Marriage : theatrical agon or Darwinian struggle?
The Father : from theater of power to power of theater
Beckett and the comedy of undoing
Shakespeare's Sonnets : the glory of poetry
The shape of love and death in Shakespeare's Sonnets
Innocence Innocence and Experience in William Blake
Whitman and the making of an American bard
"Myself" as Whitman's nineteenth century American hero
Form and flux, openness and anxiety in Whitman's poetry
Emily Dickinson : the prophetic voice from the margins
Dickinson and the poetry of consciousness
Dickinson : death and beyond
Baudelaire : the setting of the romantic sun
Baudelaire's poetry of modernism and metropolis
Robert Frost : the wisdom of the people
Wallace Stevens and the Stevens and the modernist movement
Stevens and the post-romantic imagination
Adrienne Rich and the poetry of protest
Rich's project : diving into the wreck of Western culture
The lives of the word : reading today
Chretien de Troyes' Yvain : growing up in the Middle Ages
Yvain's theme : ignorant armies clash by night
The Picaresque novel : satire, filth and hustling
Francisco Quevedo's Swindler : the word on the street
Daniel Defoe's plain style and the new world order
Moll Flanders and the self-made woman
Matter and spirit in Defoe
Dickens : the novel as moral institution
Pip's progress : from blacksmith to snob and back
Riddles of identity in Great Expectations
Charlotte Bronte and the Bildungsroman
Jane Eyre : Victorian bad girl makes good
The madwoman in the attic
Melville's "Bartleby" and the genesis of character
"Bartleby" : Christ on Wall Street?
Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis" : sacrifice or power game?
Kafka's "In the penal colony" : the writing machine
Faulkner's "The Bear" : stories of black and white
"The Bear" : American myth or American history?
Tracking the bear, or learning to read
Alice Walker's Celie : the untold story
Ideology as vision in The Color Purple
Reconceiving center and margin.