Subjects Taught by Semester

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

Do you like to mark up your books? Then you are writing about literature. This class will explore what writing about literature is like for authors themselves. From marginalia in the Talmud to adaptations like Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, writers mark up, borrow from, and rewrite other people’s stories, often reflecting in innovative ways on the creative process. Examples might include:

• Spike Lee adapting Aristophanes in his film Chi-Raq
• Alison Bechdel revising Oscar Wilde in her graphic novel Fun Home
• William Shakespeare lifting Arthur Brooke’s verse narrative to write Romeo and Juliet
• Mary Shelley reshaping her literary “dark materials” to make Frankenstein
• Herman Melville turning a travel book into Gothic horror in Benito Cereno

Assignments and group projects allow students to explore the writing process in all its messy, creative stages. Writing in margins strongly encouraged.

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

Masterpieces of European literature read with an emphasis on understanding the roots of an expansive classical tradition stemming from ancient Greece and Rome. Core texts will be Vergil’s Aeneid, the Homeric Odyssey, and Dante’s Inferno. We meet heroes and monsters, gods and demons, and read deeply into three of the foundational texts of Western literature. We ask what it means to be “a classic” and explore the ways in which literary authority comes into being in the context of history and society.

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

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

An introduction to poetry in English, chiefly by British and American poets. We will explore Renaissance, eighteenth-century, Romantic, and Modernist poetry in particular detail. Though the organization of the subject is chronological, our focus will be less on names and dates than on cultivating skills in careful reading and effective writing. Poets to be read may include Shakespeare, Sidney, Wordsworth, Keats, Dickinson, Frost, Eliot, and Elizabeth Bishop.

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

This course surveys the texts and contexts that have shaped and continue to shape American literature. From Walt Whitman’s proud assertion of an American selfhood in “Song of Myself ” (1855) to Junot Díaz’s engaging and complex consideration of national identity in The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), we will explore multiple versions of American identity as they have developed through time, across different regions both inside and outside the U.S., and through representation in the major literary genres of prose narrative, poetry, and drama. Readings include, but are not limited to the following authors: Henry James, Elizabeth Bishop, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Sherman Alexie, Gish Jen, Toni Morrison.

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 perform scenes from The Merchant of Venice and examine 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
3-3-6 HASS-A, CI-H

Films are familiar to you; this course should make them strange again.

The Film Experience serves as an introduction to film studies, concentrating on close analysis and criticism. Students will learn the technical vocabulary for analyzing the cinematic narrative, frame, and editing; develop the critical means for turning close analysis into interpretations and comparative readings of films; and explore theoretical issues. We will look beyond the surface pleasures of cinema to ask how films are put together; what choices are made formally, narratively, and politically in the constructions of different types of films; and how films have changed historically and in different production and national contexts.

We will study a wide range of works made between 1895 and 2010, including films from the early silent period, documentary and avant-garde films, European art cinema, and contemporary Hollywood fare. Directors will include Coppola, Dreyer, Eisenstein, Fellini, Godard, Griffith, Haneke, Hawks, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Kurosawa, Lang, Resnais, Spielberg, Tarantino, Vertov, Welles, and Zhang. Readings will include work from film theorists including Bazin, Bellour, Bordwell, Doane, Gunning, Metz, Mulvey, Williams, and Wollen.

Format: one 90-minute lecture, one evening screening, and one discussion hour per week.

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

Readings in British Literature, chiefly [but not exclusively] from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Studies how modes of verbal and visual humor can inform ideologies, construct social identities, mock deviants and encourage deviance, tell the truth and expell the truth-teller, topple monarchs and enforce social order.

Medieval humor and humours!
Renaissance wit!
18th century satire!
Romantic irony!
Victorian parody!
Silly walks!
Fart jokes!
Performance art!
and all the names of your former lovers embroidered on the inside of a pup-tent

Geoffrey Chaucer
William Shakespeare
Jonathan Swift
William Hogarth
William Blake
Jane Austen
Robert Browning
George Bernard Shaw
Oscar Wilde
Aubrey Beardsley
Samuel Beckett
W. H. Auden
Barbara Pym
Phillip Larkin
Tom Stoppard
Sue Townsen
Monty Python
Jeanette Winterson
Tracy Emin
Bansky

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

This course will examine detective fictions as both a mode of thinking (we ask questions about our lives) and as a literary genre. As a mode of thinking, it’s been around since Sophocles (we read Oedipus the King); as a literary genre it emerges in the nineteenth century (Edgar Allen Poe, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle), develops through classic twentieth-century and modernist and noir-ish texts (Agatha Christie, G. K. Chesterton, Raymond Chandler) and booms through postmodern uses of the genre’s structures (Jorge Louis Borges, Patricia Highsmith, and others). We’ll end with some film examples (Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock.) We’ll also consider formal, ideological, and philosophical aspects of detective fiction, using essays by structuralist/ narratology critics (Barthes, Peter Brooks) and essays by other recent critics including Jaques Lacan and Sally Munt. We’ll pay special attention to the cognitive work of “detection” and to the character of the detective: his or her social position, gender, intelligence, and wit.

Prereq: Permission of instructor
2-0-4 Can be repeated for credit

A 25-year-old first-time director (who also putatively co-wrote the script, starred in the movie, and invented a new lens to accommodate camera-angles he wanted to shoot).

A cast of actors who had never been in a movie.
Hostile reviews from a powerful publishing-syndicate.
Only one Oscar win (for the screenplay).
A box-office flop.

How can Citizen Kane possibly be the best film ever made?

Texts:

Shooting script, “Citizen Kane” [credited to Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz] F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Samuel Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
James Whale, Frankenstein [film] William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying; short stories
Robert Wiene, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari [film] Walt Disney Studios, Snow White [animated film] Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times [film] John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
John Ford, The Grapes of Wrath [film] Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism”
photographs by Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans

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

This course takes a deep look at a big subject. We ask where Fairy Tales come from, surveying the work of the famous Brothers Grimm, before moving on to historic fairy belief in traditional Celtic societies, centering on the folkloristic work of Robert Kirk in late seventeenth-century Scotland, and his links with the Royal Society. We look at the structure of Fairy Tales, and how they are conditioned by oral transmission, and inherited story-telling techniques.

We ask what Fairy Tales mean, considering a range of Freudian and Jungian interpretations, and the claims made for them as a key psychological tool.

There follow two case studies of the abuse of Fairy Tales, firstly by the Nazis in 1930s Germany for the purposes of political indoctrination, and, secondly, by Walt Disney in the famous series of animated movies starting with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. We consider the filmic techniques involved, and the charges of sexism and political conservatism frequently laid at Disney’s door.

We end with a close study of modern literary written Fairy Tales from writers including Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Dickens, L. Frank Baum, Margaret Atwood, and Angela Carter.

The goal of the class is to teach students how to approach cultural history in a broad-based multi-disciplinary manner, using a blend of folklore, history, psychology, and film and textual studies. The student will gain a detailed appreciation of the links between oral tradition and print, and the means by which culture is transmitted down the centuries via a wide range of media.

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. Yet long before that, nineteenth-century writers such as Mary Shelley, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edith Nesbit were penning their own Strange Stories (1884), testing out many of the sci-fi and fantasy tropes that contemporary authors continue to retool to this day.

Mad scientists and the monsters they create! “Last man on earth” dystopias! Stories about robots, time machines, and mummies who come back to life and rampage around museums…not to mention a park filled with dinosaurs living next door to modern humans! In all of these cases, the Victorians got there before us, in fictions that were heavily influenced by the earth-shaking hypotheses being advanced by nineteenth-century scientists such as Charles Darwin and Richard Owen. In this course, we will explore not only how nineteenth-century science influenced art, but also how art influenced science.

Prereq: Permission of instructor
3-0-9 HASS-H; Can be repeated for credit

In this course, we will not only consider how writers portray and try to understand what it means to be distinctly human, but also explore what it means and entails to become a better human being, especially as we enter what many are calling a “second machine age” in which machines will take over jobs formerly occupied by human beings. What does it mean to be humane and to evolve into your own distinct humanity while pursuing your various definitions of success? What aspects of our identity get sacrificed in this pursuit of success, particularly in the context of what standards of success tend to look like in American culture? How is the label “human” wielded to exclude certain groups of people from that category? We’ll read essays by Sylvia Wynter and Lorraine Hansberry and fictional texts by Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Suzan Lori Parks, Claudia Rankine, and others:

Beloved, Toni Morrison
Lilith’s Brood Trilogy, Octavia Butler
Venus, Suzan Lori Parks
Essays, Lorraine Hansberry
I, Robot, both Isaac Asimov’s collection & Alex Proyas’s film
Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot

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. 28, 2016)

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

This subject raises basic questions: What is a (literary or filmic) text? How was it made, and under what conditions? Who made it, and why should that matter? What happened to it over time? What do we make of it now, and why? We will focus on four major narrative works from different periods and genres: most probably, a play by Shakespeare, a nineteenth-century novel, a more contemporary literary work, and a film. Through close attention to these works’ origins, contemporary reception, and subsequent fate, we will examine the crucial roles of storytelling and interpretation in the making of meaning.

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 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 thoroughgoing 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.

We will read the work of two friends and collaborators, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, alongside a colorful secondary cast of radicals, philosophers, and scientists. We will also read some later poetry and prose — by Lord Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, and others — that revisits the poetry and ideas of the previous generation with irony, remorse, or humor.

Prereq: 21L.011, one subject in Literature or Comparative Media Studies; or permission of instructor
3-3-6 HASS-H, CI-M; Can be repeated for credit

Film adaptations of novels, plays, and films. Films will include film noir adaptations of science fiction and detective novels and stories, classic fiction, autobiography; films made from plays; films based on other films, and avant-garde takes on Shakespeare. Films and texts: Blade Runner/Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The Big Sleep, The Big Lebowski, The Hours/Mrs. Dalloway, Clueless/Emma, A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, X [Malcolm X]/Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Man Who Knew Too Much, North By Northwest, The Passenger (Professione: Reporter), Prospero’s Books, King Lear (Godard).