Subjects Taught by Semester

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-HW

From the beginning we are already in the hands of the other, a thrilling and terrifying way to begin.

—Judith Butler

“Read for love,” Seulghee Lee suggests. And we will follow his suggestion. This course is designed around analyzing intimate bonds and the permutations of heartbreak. How is love characterized on the fictional page and screen? And what might the lover’s break-up and his/her spinning into narcissistic despair teach us about the self and how we love? Through the analysis of novels, short stories, poetry, music videos, and live theatre, we will consider the transformative states of the lover’s (un)becoming.

Traversing genres, periods and cultures, we will also reflect on the relationship between wooing-author and swooning-reader, that is, as a bond that relates you as a writer to me and your classmates as your readers. On your pages, too, there may surface a playful flirtation, (false) promises, a tantrum or two, passion, intimacy, heartache, sarcasm, even humor. Essentially, in this course, you will write for love.

BOOK LIST: Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, Junot Díaz’s This Is How You Lose Her, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-H

This class covers about three thousand years of European literature, so it’s a pretty labor-intensive way to get CI-H credit. So don’t take it for that alone. Take it for the opportunity to read some of the coolest, weirdest, and most influential texts in the western canon: adventure tales of travel and self-discovery (Homer’s Odyssey and Dante’s Inferno); courtroom dramas of vengeance and reconciliation (Aeschylus’s Oresteia and the Icelandic Njáls saga); short poems of love and transformation (Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Lais of Marie de France); and epics of war, nation-building, and empire (Homer’s Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid, and the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf). We are going back in time: safety not guaranteed.

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-H

Believing you’re special rarely ends well in a novel. But watching protagonists aspire, rise, and fall is one of the most consistent pleasures of fiction for its readers. This class examines novels about people who are convinced they’ll do something important and extraordinary. Sometimes the dream proves impossible. Sometimes it comes true, but in disastrous, ironic ways: think of Frankenstein. Along the way, we’ll discuss novelists’ persistent engagement with the ideals and limitations of social mobility. We’ll also examine how these themes shape the form of the novel itself: what are the ambitions of novelists, and the perils of literary success? Authors might include Daniel Defoe, Mary Shelley, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Edward P. Jones, and Zadie Smith.

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-H

This subject traces the main lines of descent in English-language poetry from the Renaissance to the modern period, concentrating mostly on English examples. We will study the poetic achievements of three groups of authors: (1) poets of the renaissance and seventeenth century, including Shakespeare, Donne, Marvell and Milton, (2) poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Emily Dickinson, and (3) poets of the twentieth-century, including Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop and Phillip Larkin.

Poetry departs from the apparently straightforward sentences of narrative, exposition and argument—the stuff of everyday writing and conversation—by how it makes use of metaphors and other figures of speech, whose meanings are often not immediately clear. But figurative language is not the exclusive property of poetry. On the contrary, metaphor is an inevitable characteristic not only of everyday, so-called literal speech but also of human thought, and poetry differs from everyday speech not because it uses metaphors but because it energizes, alters, and re-invents the figures of speech employed by non-poetic language. A linguistic community is marked by the metaphors that it lives by, and the nature of the relation between poetic metaphor and the effortless metaphors of everyday speech will be at the focus of our discussions.

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-HW

William Shakespeare didn’t go to college. If he could time-travel like Dr. Who, he would be stunned to find his words on a university syllabus. But he would not be surprised at the way we will be using those words in this class, because the study of rhetoric was essential to all education in his day. We too will focus on communication using words, with Shakespeare as a capacious model and inspiration for dialogue, self-presentation and writing. We will also benefit by meeting periodically with the other Shakespeare classes and professors, for films, scene analysis, presentations, and more.

By writing “with” Shakespeare—creatively, critically, in groups and in a variety of media—you will have ample opportunity to explore the elements and occasions that shape effective, meaningful communication. In addition to famous speeches and sonnets, we will consider film versions of Hamlet and the challenges of social exchange in Othello. We will examine the specifics of stage comedy and the enduring power of Shakespeare across the globe. Nevertheless, our aim is less to appreciate Shakespeare as an end in itself than to draw on his remarkable drama (its vocabulary, variety, and verbal command) in order to help you improve your own writing, speaking, analytic thinking, use of resources, and understanding of media today.

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-A/H, CI-H

In this subject, we investigate the ways that broadly held ideas about the supernatural made their way into works of literature and some key symphonic and operatic works based on them, over a period spanning 1600 to 1960. We’ll study three aspects of the topic in roughly chronological order: Witches, Learned Magic, and Spiritualism. Materials range from the depositions of accused witches to live performances of Schubert’s songs and screenings of films such as Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Murnau’s silent Faust. Operas will be studied primarily through the medium of filmed performances rather than musical scores, allowing students the opportunity to experience these works as dramatic performances.

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-H

What’s so funny? This course will investigate the humorous, the bawdy, the brash, and the offensive in the history of drama and film. We will read especially closely from the works of the first great humorists of the Western tradition, Aristophanes and Plautus, and will track their influence through performance halls and cinemas from Shakespeare’s Globe Theater to Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Satisfies the historical requirement for Literature as well as the Area II requirement in Ancient and Medieval Studies.

Prereq: none
2-0-4 Can be repeated for credit; first half of term

This course will explore our culture’s fascination with stories of crime and detection. We’ll spend a week on foundational short stories by Poe, Conan Doyle, and Dashiell Hammett, then look at some best-selling private eyes by contemporary writers. Among the questions we’ll explore: What historical and cultural forces help to explain the rise of the detective in the late nineteenth century and his (and her!) proliferation in our own time? Why are the formulas and conventions of genre so attractive to readers as well as writers? What special pleasures and insights are on offer in detective stories? Students will write a response journal and a brief essay on a text (or film or TV series) not on our primary syllabus.

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H; Can be repeated for credit

This course takes a brief look at a big subject. Where do Fairy Tales come from? We survey the work of the most famous of the collectors: the Brothers Grimm. How did they set about their task? Who did they collect from? How did they present their findings? Can we rely on what they tell us? We move on to genuine historic fairy belief in traditional Celtic societies, before turning to the structure of Fairy Tales, and the seminal work of Vladimir Propp on their roots in oral tradition. Next we consider what Fairy Tales might mean. Are they just for children, or do they have some deeper, perhaps darker, meaning? We consider a range of Freudian and other psychological interpretations focusing on Bruno Bettelheim and his book The Uses of Enchantment. Then follow two case studies of the abuse of Fairy Tales: firstly by the Nazis in 1930s Germany; secondly, by Walt Disney in the famous series of animated movies starting with Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in 1937. The course is completed with detailed study of selected modern literary fairy tales beginning with Hans Christian Andersen and ending with the poem sequence “The Grimm Sisters” (1981) by Liz Lochhead and short stories by Angela Carter from The Bloody Chamber and other stories (1979).

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H

The Hugo Awards are named after Hugo Gernsback, who coined the term “science fiction” in 1926 while publishing Amazing Stories, the first magazine devoted solely to science fiction. The origin of the genre we call “science fiction” is more open to debate, but it arguably predates Gernsback’s term by two centuries. In this class, we will study the prehistory of science fiction in Britain and America, focusing most of our attention on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895). We will also explore the key role that children’s writers such as Mark Twain, Edith Nesbit, and L. Frank Baum played in popularizing speculative fiction.

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H

The Bible – both Hebrew Bible and New Testament – is a complex and fascinating text, written by many people, in different languages, over a vast period of time, yet still displaying an overarching unity. Our purpose in this course is to consider the Bible as both a collection of disparate books and as a unified whole. Of course it is impossible to discuss the Bible without reference to religion, but religious interpretation – whether Jewish or Christian – is not our primary concern. Rather, we will explore the Bible’s literary techniques and its enormous variety of genres – everything from myth to history, from genealogy to poetry – as well as the historical periods that produced and are reflected in it. We will also consider issues arising from the history of the translation of the Bible from its original Hebrew and Greek. We will read Genesis, Exodus, selections from Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, 1 and 2 Samuel, Isaiah, Job, Daniel, the Gospels, Acts, Pauline Epistles, and Revelation.

Prereq: One subject in Literature
3-0-9 HASS-H; Can be repeated for credit

This subject traces the history of the European novel by studying texts that have been influential in the development of the novel as the characteristic form of fiction in the modern world. We will concern ourselves with the way in which the novel-form is particularly apt at representing the historical character of class distinctions as they play out in the everyday details of social life. This feature often carries a suggestion about literature in general: that the most significant representations of the human condition are those dealing with persons who try to compel society to accept them as its agents.

The readings begin with Cervantes’s masterpiece, Don Quixote, which pokes fun at the idea that one can elect oneself as a person of destiny. It also introduces into narrative fiction a kind of teasing inquiry into the various devices by which narratives tend to endow characters with importance. We then turn to serious representations of these ideas in nineteenth-century fiction: Balzac’s Old Goriot, Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Endowing characters with extraordinary intensity, these books constitute the main tradition of modern realistic fiction. In reading them, we will also consider the distinctions to be drawn between the realistic tradition and the tradition of naturalism, which deals with characters more subdued in their relation to the social forces that constrain their lives. Our readings will end with two works of twentieth-century fiction— Joseph Roth’s The Radetsky March and Albert Camus’s The Plague.

Prereq: One subject in Literature, permission of instructor
3-0-9 HASS-H; Can be repeated for credit

Christopher Columbus’s initial description of the Americas featured rivers of gold and man-eating monsters. From the moment settlers and conquistadors first encountered its endless frontiers, abundant nature, and alien cultures, the New World has often stood as otherworldly counterpart to European worldliness. This course will examine how contemporary North and Latin American authors have reflected on their national identities through horror, magical realism and science fiction.

Our first unit will consider hauntings and ghosts stories as attempts to make sense of the hemisphere’s violent past. In the second, we will explore divergent worlds, geographies and timelines that reimagine otherness and cultural plurality. The final unit will study genetic and cybernetic splicings that blur the carefully guarded lines between man, animal and machine.

Texts we will read include: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, as well as short stories by Borges, Poe, Lovecraft and Ocampo. We will also analyze the Brazilian graphic novel Daytripper, the Canadian television series Orphan Black, the film Jupiter Ascending and the music of Janelle Monáe.

Course trailer for 21L.512 Weird Americas in Fall 2015.

Prereq: none
3-0-3; first half of term

Latin I offers an introduction for those who do not know the language, or a review for those who would like to refresh the Latin that they have previously learned. In this half-semester intensive course, students will learn the rudiments of Latin vocabulary and grammar, including basic vocabulary, word forms, and simple sentence structure. This is the equivalent of a full first semester of college-level Latin.

(Ends Oct. 23, 2015)

Prereq: One intermediate subject in Spanish or permission of instructor
3-0-9 HASS-H

This course examines the vast changes in Spanish life that emerged during the transition to democracy that followed Franco’s death in 1975. We will focus on the new freedom from censorship: cinema, literature—including fiction and theater—educational reforms, the reemergence of movements for regional autonomy, and changes in daily life: gender roles, work, and family that accompanied this transition. Course materials include documentaries, a telenovela, as well as DVDs produced in Spain that chronicle the Transición from dictatorship to democracy. The class uses the Spanish newspaper, El País, to discuss the way contemporary Spaniards view their own and international politics. Each student chooses a topic to research throughout the semester. The topics can include any theme of the course that is of special interest. The final project for the class will be based on that research and will be presented in class and in writing. The class is conducted in Spanish and all the readings, with the exception of Giles Tremlett’s history of the transition, are in Spanish.

Prereq: Two subjects in Literature
3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-M; Can be repeated for credit

The poetry we’ll read in this seminar was written against the background of momentous social, political and economic transformation. Alternately inspired by and aghast at these transformations, Romantic writers undertook an ambitious project to expand and redefine poetry and what it means to be a poet. Beyond inventing new poetic genres, styles, and theories of poetry, these authors envisioned nothing less than a thorough-going reevaluation of the writer’s vocation in the modern world. To write (and to read) was to be part of a world-making, potentially world-changing enterprise – as potentially efficacious in changing the world as the historical and political events to which their poetry responded.

Our reading will focus on the work of two friends and collaborators, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and that of William’s sister Dorothy. Along the way we’ll encounter a colorful secondary cast of poets, radicals, philosophers, and scientists. We will also read some later poetry and prose (Lord Byron’s Don Juan, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater) that revisits the poetry and ideas of the previous generation with irony, remorse, or humor.

Prereq: Two subjects in Literature or permission of instructor
3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-M; Can be repeated for credit

In this class, we will read great classic novels by Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Edith Wharton, Sarah Orne Jewett, Gloria Naylor, and some delicious stories by Toni Cade Bambara. We will interpret these texts, themselves fun to read, in the light of some powerful feminist literary analyses written about them in the last two decades of the twentieth century—analyses which together constitute a decisive contribution to feminist thinking. This major body of cultural theory retains its vital significance, although it is rarely read today and has largely slipped from sight of the younger generation. But it has not been superseded—and rarely equaled subsequently—and its insights are as important today for thinking about society and culture as when it was first written. This class takes us into a key episode in recent cultural history as well as developing the higher skills in reading fiction and giving us a fresh slant on gender politics.

Prereq: Two subjects in Literature or Comparative Media Studies; or permission of instructor
3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-M; Can be repeated for credit

A kaleidoscopic introduction to the history and theory of communications from papyrus to pixel. With weekly “lab” sessions in MIT Library’s Special Collections, where students will get to dig deep into historical books and other media through a series of special projects and case studies, this class offers a serious primer in media and media theory, with special focus on histories of the book. Will be of interest to students of literature, music, media, or history. Readings may include McLuhan, Derrida, Kittler, Gitelman, Vismann, Kirschenbaum, and Siegert. Satisfies the historical requirement for Literature.