NL Reading Series

Booklet #1 has short readings from Homer's The Odyssey, William Hazlitt's Essays, and Eric Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.

This week's instalment of the NL reading series features Plato's Allegory of the Cave from Book 7 of The Republic, alongside secondary readings from Nietzsche, Gorgy Lukács and an article on Hannah Arendt's critique of Plato's political philosophy.

This week's instalment of the NL reading series features an excerpt from Machiavelli's The Prince, alongside readings from J.G.A. Pocock's hugely influential The Machiavellian Moment (1975) and Antonio Gramsci's "The Modern Prince."

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Booklet #7 features short extracts from Shakespeare's King Lear, alongside critical readings from Marjorie Garber's Shakespeare After All (2003) and Erich Auerbach's Mimesis (1945).

Booklet #9 features features extracts from John Milton's great epic poem, Paradise Lost. In the secondary readings, I've included an extract from Anthony Low's Reinvention of Love: Poetry, Politics and Culture from Sidney to Milton (2009), along with some of T.S. Eliot's notorious lecture/critical attack on Milton, first published in 1936 (and partially retracted in 1957). Low's chapter on Milton is an excellent riposte to the poet's twentieth-century detractors, of whom Eliot was only one.

Booklet #11 features an extract from Flannery O'Connor's powerful short story "The Displaced Person" (1954). The secondary reading is an excerpt from Gillian Rose’s essay, “Beginnings of the day - Fascism and Representation,” which is found in her book, Mourning Becomes the Law (1996). Here O'Connor gives us a richly detailed picture of the post-war volatility of race relations and the color-line in the Southern states of the U.S. 

Booklet #2 has short readings from Sophocles' Antigone, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981), Martha Nussbaum's The Fragility of Goodness (1986), and Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995)

This week's instalment of the NL reading series features the second canto of Dante's Inferno, alongside important critical readings from Kenneth Gross and Erich Auerbach.

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Booklet #6 features an extract from book 1 of More's Utopia that analyses and debates the primary causes of poverty and theft in early 16C England. In the critical reading, I’ve included excerpts from Hanan Yoran’s Between Utopia and Dystopia (2010), and Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980). 

Booklet #8 features two extracts from Thomas Shelton's translation (1612) of Cervantes' Don Quixote (Part I), alongside critical readings from Robert Echevarría's Casebook, Cervantes’ Don Quixote (Yale, 2015), and Myriam Y. Jehenson's The Utopian Nexus in Don Quixote (VUP, 2006).

Booklet #10 features some extracts from The German Ideology by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The opening focuses on the distinctions between the Old and the Young Hegelians, and the shortcomings of both in their conceptions of consciousness and liberation.  Then we have a section in which Marx and Engels set forth the basic tenets of their materialism, and do so with a lucidity that surpasses many of its later formulations.  The secondary reading is from an essay by the British Historian, E.P. Thompson, entitled "An Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski."

Booklet #12 features an extract from Adorno and Horkheimer's seminal essay, "The Culture Industry as Mass Deception" (1945). The secondary reading, which is again from Gillian Rose (though a different book), provides some useful historical and critical context for the emergence and work of the Frankfurt School, which was led by Adorno and Horkheimer. So I won't address that here.