How is it possible that “the best book of the century (for now)” was out of print for over a decade? Take a tumble into Helen DeWitt’s dense, but rewarding, The Last Samurai. This novel, ripe with intertextual references and allusions, is sure to require plenty of discourse and discovery, outside of the nightly reading. DeWitt’s work is a contemporary epic that builds, very specifically, on ideas from The Odyssey and The Iliad. Students will also watch and analyze Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai in order to better understand DeWitt’s work, while also enduring a crash course in several languages and mathematics, whose inclusion threaten to question what a novel has been, is, and can be.

Departmental approval is required for this course.