On this page, you will find generic descriptions of literature subjects that correspond to the MIT Bulletin (Course Catalog).
Prereq: none
3-3-6 HASS-H/SS
Explores fundamental questions about the experience of illness from the points of view of the patient, the physician, and the caretaker. Examines the ways in which these narratives have changed across centuries and across cultures. Asks about the physician’s role in determining treatment; whether storytelling leads to more ethical life and death decisions; what special insights patient narratives provide; and what new awareness physicians derive from narrating illness. Materials include essays, fiction, poetry, memoir, blogs, film and television. As a capstone project, students develop their own medical narratives that emerge in interaction with a mentor from the greater-Boston medical community.
(Same subject as CMS.920)
Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H; Can be repeated for credit
Examines relationships between popular culture and art, focusing on problems of evaluation and audience, and the uses of different media within a broader social context. Typically treats a range of narrative and dramatic works as well as films. Previously taught topics include Elements of Style; Gender, Sexuality and Popular Narrative. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments. Approved for credit in Women’s and Gender Studies when content meets the requirements for subjects in that program. May be repeated for credit with permission of instructor.
Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H
Examines the adaptation, performance and interpretation of Shakespearean plays on film and video. Focus varies from term to term, to include films such as the Olivier and Almereyda versions of Hamlet and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet; “spin-offs” such as Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Shakespeare in Love; or theatrical videos of English language and international productions.
(Same subject as CMS.915)
Prereq: One subject in Literature or Comparative Media Studies
3-0-9 HASS-H; Can be repeated for credit
A cultural approach to television’s evolution as a technology and system of representation. Considers television as a system of storytelling and mythmaking, and as a cultural practice studied from anthropological, literary, and cinematic perspectives. Focuses on prime-time commercial broadcasting, the medium’s technological and economic history, and theoretical perspectives. Considerable television viewing and readings in media theory and cultural interpretation are required. Previously taught topics include American Television: A Cultural History. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments.
Prereq: 21L.011 or permission of instructor
3-0-9 HASS-H; Can be repeated for credit
Close study of one or more directors, genres, periods, artistic movements, or national cinemas which have been of major significance in the history of film. Previously taught topics include: Hollywood and Hong Kong; and Movie Realists: Chaplin, Renoir, Neo-realism, Truffaut. May be repeated for credit by permission of instructor.
Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H
Traces the history of science fiction as a generic tradition in literature, media, and popular culture. Considers formal ideological and cultural approaches to the analysis and interpretation of science fiction and fantasy texts. May be repeated for credit with permission of instructor if content differs.
(Same subject as CMS.840)
Prereq: One subject in Literature or Comparative Media Studies
3-3-6 HASS-H; Can be repeated for credit
Investigates relationships between the two media, including film adaptations as well as works linked by genre, topic, and style. Explores how artworks challenge and cross cultural, political, and aesthetic boundaries. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments. May be repeated for credit with permission of instructor if content differs.
Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H
Immerses students in literature that represents the interaction between humans and nature as sublime, revelatory, and mutually sustaining. Without denying the damage humans have wreaked on the environment, explores the role that pleasure, wonder, and hope might play in helping us to envision new modes of engagement. Examples of authors studied include William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Annie Dillard, and Lauret Savoy. May be repeated for credit with permission of instructor if content differs.
Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H
Examines how we read texts and the questions that we, as readers, ask of them. Introduces different critical approaches to literature by examining the relationship between readers and text, between different texts, and between text and context. Topics vary but usually include reader-response theory, structuralism and semiotics, post-structuralism and post-modernism, historicism, psychoanalysis, intertextuality, cultural criticism, and media theory.
(Same subject as 24.140)
Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H
Highlights interactions between literary and philosophical texts, asking how philosophical themes can be explored in fiction, poetry, and drama. Exposes students to diverse modes of humanistic thought, interpretation, and argument, putting the tools and ideas of philosophy into conversation with those of the literary humanities. Students engage closely with selected literary and philosophical texts, explore selected topics in philosophy – such as ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics – through a literary lens, and participate in class discussion with peers and professors. Limited to 20.
Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H; Can be repeated for credit
Close examination of major works of classical Greek and Roman literature in translation. Topics may include epic, history, lyric poetry, or drama and the works of authors such as Thucydides, Homer, Virgil, and Cicero. Texts vary from term to term. May be repeated once for credit if content differs. Enrollment limited.
Prereq: none
3-0-9 H
Introduces students to the three divisions of the Old Testament: Pentateuch, Prophets, Writings. Particular attention to literary techniques, the historical periods that produced and are reflected in the various books, issues resulting from translation, and the difference between Old Testament and Hebrew Bible. Students cannot also receive credit for 21L.458.
Prereq: none
3-0-9 H
Introduces students to the genres that comprise the New Testament: gospels, history, letters, apocalypse. Particular attention to historical context, canonicity, translation, and the transformation of Hebrew Bible into Old Testament. Students cannot also receive credit for 21L.458.
Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H
An introduction to major books from both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Particular attention given to literary techniques, issues resulting from translation from the original Hebrew and Greek, and the different historical periods that produced and are reflected in the Bible. Students cannot also receive credit for 21L.456 or 21L.457.
Prereq: One subject in Literature
3-0-9 HASS-H; Can be repeated for credit
Tracing the evolution of King Arthur (and principal knights), students consider what underlies the appeal of this figure whose consistent reappearance in western culture has performed the medieval prophecy that he would be rex quondam et futurus: the once and future king. Examines how Arthur’s persona has been reinvented and rewritten throughout history, including portrayals as Christian hero and war-leader, ineffective king and pathetic cuckold, and as a tragic figure of noble but doomed intentions. Enrollment limited.
Prereq: One subject in Literature
3-0-9 HASS-H; Can be repeated for credit
Studies important examples of the literary form that, from the beginning of the 18th century to the present day, has become an indispensable instrument for representing modern life, in the hands of such writers as Cervantes, Defoe, Richardson, Sterne, Burney, Austen, Scott, Dickens, the Brontes, Eliot, Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Hardy, Conrad, Woolf, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Proust, and others. May be repeated for credit with permission of instructor.
(Same subject as WGS.240[J])
Prereq: One subject in Literature
3-0-9 HASS-H
An examination of Jane Austen’s satire in her seven complete novels, several fragments, and juvenilia. Students read these texts in relation to her letters and other biographical and historical information.
Prereq: One subject in Literature
3-0-9 HASS-H; Can be repeated for credit
Examines selected topics in 18th- and 19th-century English/European literature and culture from the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660 to the end of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1901. Topics vary by term; authors may include Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Conan Doyle, among others. May be repeated for credit with permission of instructor.
(Same subject as WGS.245)
Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H
Focuses on LGBT literature from the mid-19 century to the present, with an emphasis on fiction and poetry. In particular, analyzes how LGBT identities and their literary representations have changed over time. Covers authors such as Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, Melvin Dixon, Leslie Feinberg, and Luis Negron.
(Same subject as WGS.250)
Prereq: none
3-0-9 H
Examines cultural responses to HIV/AIDS in the US during the first fifteen years of the epidemic, prior to the advent of highly active antiretroviral therapy. Students consider how sexuality, race, gender, class, and geography shaped the experience of HIV/AIDS and the cultural production surrounding it, as well as the legacy of this cultural production as it pertains to the communities most at risk today. Materials include mainstream press coverage, film, theater, television, popular music, comic books, literature, and visual art.
Prereq: One subject in Literature
3-0-9 HASS-H
Tradition and innovation in representative fiction of the early modern period. Recurring themes include the role of the artist in the modern period; the representation of psychological and sexual experience; and the virtues (and defects) of the aggressively experimental character. Works by Conrad, Kipling, Babel, Kafka, James, Lawrence, Mann, Ford Madox Ford, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Nabokov. May be repeated for credit with permission of instructor if content differs.
Prereq: One subject in Literature
3-0-9 HASS-A
Explores major modern plays with special attention to performance, sociopolitical and aesthetic contexts, and the role of theater in the contemporary multimedial landscape. Includes analysis of class, gender, and race as modes of performance. Typically features Beckett and Brecht, as well as some of the following playwrights: Chekov, Churchill, Deavere Smith, Ibsen, Fornes, Friel, Kushner, O’Neill, Shaw, Stoppard, Soyinka, Williams, Wilson. May be repeated for credit with permission of instructor if content differs.
Prereq: One subject in Literature
3-0-9 HASS-H
Study of major poems and manifestos from the late 19th century through the early 21st century. Examines works written in English, with some attention to Modernist texts from other cultures and other languages as well. Poems by T. S. Eliot, W. C. Williams, Langston Hughes, Robert Frost, Pablo Neruda, Hilda Doolittle, Charles Baudelaire, Anna Akhmatova, Bertolt Brecht, Rabindranath Tagore, and others. Comprised primarily of discussions, short papers, and a final project. May be repeated for credit with permission of instructor if content differs.
Prereq: One subject in Literature
3-0-9 HASS-H
Study of key themes and techniques in prose, poetry, and drama since the 1970s. Recent topics include postmodernism, globalization, new British and Irish writing, and literature and development. May be repeated for credit with permission of instructor if content differs.
(Same subject as 21W.765[J], CMS.845)
Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-A
Provides a workshop environment for understanding interactive narrative (print and digital) through critical writing, narrative theory, and creative practice. Covers important multisequential books, hypertexts, and interactive fictions. Students write critically, and give presentations, about specific works; write a short multisequential fiction; and develop a digital narrative system, which involves significant writing and either programming or the structuring of text. Programming ability helpful.
(Same subject as 21G.077[J])
Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H
Explores the works of classical Russian writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, including stories and novels by Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Bunin, Nabokov, Platonov, and others. Focuses on their approaches to portraying self and society, and on literary responses to fundamental ethical and philosophical questions about justice, freedom, free will, fate, love, loyalty, betrayal, and forgiveness. Taught in English; students interested in completing some readings and a short writing project in Russian should register for 21G.618.
(Same subject as 21G.066)
Prereq: none
3-0-9 H
Introduction to two millennia of Korean literature and culture. Discusses texts, artifacts, and films in their cultural context and from a comparative global perspective. Explores poetry; historiography, story-telling, drama and fiction; philosophical and religious texts and practices; and visual materials. Includes creative exercises to help students develop their own Korean wave and K-drama passions with a critically informed eye.
(Same subject as 21M.729)
Prereq: none
3-0-9 A
Traces the evolution of the American musical from minstrelsy to Hamilton. Equips students with terms, tools, and techniques to enrich their analysis of how individual songs, scenes, and dances — as well as whole shows — are structured. Recovers the groundbreaking yet often forgotten or appropriated achievements of artists of color to Broadway and Hollywood musicals. Features a mix of creative and critical assignments, some of which may be linked to field trips to local theaters, dance studios, and archives. Limited to 20.
Prereq: Permission of instructor
3-0-9 HASS-H; Can be repeated for credit
Works by major American novelists, beginning with the late 18th century and concluding with a contemporary novelist. Major emphasis on reading novels as literary texts, but attention paid to historical, intellectual, and political contexts as well. Syllabus varies from term to term, but many of the following writers are represented: Rowson, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Wharton, James, and Toni Morrison. Previously taught topics include The American Revolution and Makeovers (i.e. adaptations and reinterpretation of novels traditionally considered as American “Classics”). May be repeated for credit with instructor’s permission so long as the content differs.
(Same subject as WGS.140[J])
Prereq: Permission of instructor
3-0-9 HASS-H; Can be repeated for credit
Questions posed by the literature of the Americas about the relationship of race and gender to authorship, audience, culture, ethnicity, and aesthetics. Social conditions and literary histories that shape the politics of identity in American literature. Specific focus varies each term. Previously taught topics include Immigrant Stories, African American Literature, and Asian American Literature. May be repeated for credit with permission of instructor if the content differs.
Prereq: One subject in Literature, permission of instructor
3-0-9 HASS-H; Can be repeated for credit
Examines in detail the works of several American authors selected according to a theme, period, genre, or set of issues. Through close readings of poetry, novels, or plays, subject addresses such issues as literary influence, cultural diversity, and the writer’s career. Previously taught topics include American Women Writers, American Autobiography, American Political Writing, and American Short Fiction. Approved for credit in Women’s and Gender Studies when content meets the requirements for subjects in that program. May be repeated for credit with instructor’s permission so long as the content differs.
(Same subject as 21G.022[J], WGS.141[J])
Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-H
Introduces students to a variety of fictional works by contemporary women writers. International perspective emphasizes the extent to which each author’s work reflects her distinct cultural heritage and to what extent, if any, there is an identifiable female voice that transcends national boundaries. Uses a variety of interpretive perspectives, including sociohistorical, psychoanalytic, and feminist criticism, to examine texts. Authors include Mariama Ba, Isabel Allende, Anita Desai, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, Alifa Riyaat, Yang Jiang, Nawal Al-Saadawi, and Sawako Ariyoshi. Taught in English.
Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-A
Students study theories of translation, compare examples of multiple renderings of the same work, and work on translation projects. Supplementary assignments focus on adaptation of works from one genre to another, and on transmission of information from one mode to another (visual to verbal changes, American Sign Language, etc.). Students write essays about relative theories of translation and about comparisons of variant versions, and also work on translation projects of their own in workshop-format. Includes texts such as the King James Bible, and writers such as Walter Benjamin, George Steiner, Wislawa Szymborska, Czeslaw Milosz, Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, Rainer Maria Rilke, William Gass, and Robert Pinsky. Limited to 18.
Prereq: none
3-3-3 HASS-E
Students travel to Spain to explore the country’s influence on our understanding of contemporary culture, from its role as the crucible of the international avant-garde, to its genesis of political art and writing, to its Civil War that ignited the artistic passion of authors around the world, to the exuberant liberation after 40 years of dictatorship. Readings include Hemingway, Lorca, Orwell, Neruda, memoirs of Americans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Spanish poetry of the war and repression that followed, and the films of Saura and Almodovar. Films, readings, field trips to museums, and cultural events enable students to understand the full context in which today’s vibrant Spanish democracy emerged. Contact Literature about travel fee and possible funding opportunities. Enrollment limited. Application required; contact Literature Headquarters for details.
Prereq: none
3-3-3 HASS-E
Based in London, explores the specific locations, history and artistic institutions that have made London a world cultural hub, deepening students’ knowledge gained on site through guided readings, theater performances, visits to homes associated with major authors, guest experts, and independent “author mapping” projects with reports back to the class. Sharpens students’ understanding of the complexities of international exchange and identity formation in a global age. Contact Literature about travel fee and possible funding opportunities. Enrollment limited. Application required; contact Literature Headquarters for details.
(Same subject as WGS.247 / 21W.781)
Prereq: none
3-3-3 HASS-E
Based in São Paulo, this course examines the relationship between race and place in the formation of modern Brazil and the U.S. through comparative analysis and interdisciplinary study of literature, film, visual art, music, and performance.
We will visit key cultural and historical sites; interact with archives and museum collections; and, most importantly, engage in dialogue with local scholars, religious leaders, community organizers, and activists.
