Subjects Taught by Semester

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

We’ll read about thirty remarkable stories — roughly two or three each week – by a roster of great and very good writers, chosen to represent something of the formal diversity and moral and artistic complexity of the short story as a literary form. Among our authors: Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Joyce, Gabriel Marquez, Doris Lessing, Flannery O’Connor,  Alice Munro, Lydia Davis.

I aim for lively discussion from everyone. In addition to reading our week’s stories, I expect students to have searched online for basic general information about our authors’ lives and major writings. We’ll begin each class with a brief overview of our writer, and then work toward a close reading of the required story. Students must bring texts to class; we’ll be reading many passages together during our discussions. In most classes we’ll discuss two complex stories, so you must be truly prepared, familiar with the texts, ready to talk about them seriously.

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

In this class we will read and discuss a lot of poems. We will also consider why so many people, going all the way back to Plato, have distrusted poets and despised their work. Among other activities, students will translate poetry into prose to see if there is something distinctive about poetic language; explore the many meanings that common words have gained and lost over the centuries, and think about how that matters; read all 154 Shakespeare sonnets to see if they’re really as good as most people seem to think (don’t worry, we’ll read many authors besides Shakespeare!); and find a poem they love (or hate, or otherwise feel inspired to share), assign it to the class, and lead a discussion of it. Opportunities for writing will be many and varied.

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

At the dark heart of American literature lies a fascination with all that is wild, alien, and deeply disturbing. From nightmarish Puritan sermons and Indian-captivity narratives, to the fever dreams of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, to profound meditations on national sin (Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Emily Dickinson, Octavia Butler) to fixations on the precarious self in a world of horrors (Mark Twain, Henry James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison), American authors have found creative inspiration in Gothic imaginings. In this CI-H class, with close attention to writing and communication skills, students will explore a range of forms—stories, poems, memoir, novels, film—through class discussion, essays, oral presentations, and a final project.

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.

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 analyze film versions of King Lear and the comedy of Twelfth Night. We will perform scenes from what is now a “problem play,” The Merchant of Venice, and attend a professional production of Julius Caesar. In all these cases, we will examine the reasons for Shakespeare’s enduring power and performance around 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

In this course, we will study fantasy narratives that invite readers to immerse themselves in enchanted alternative realms or magical worlds enmeshed within the realm of everyday life. Revisiting familiar environs such as Never Land, Narnia, Middle-Earth, and Hogwarts and concluding with a trip through more contemporary and diverse fantasylands, we will investigate how authors employ the tools of fiction to craft such convincing alternative worlds. Are these fantasies an escapist solution to the problem of modern disenchantment, or can we tell some more complicated story about their emergence and function? Since creative writers are themselves astute critics of fantasy, we will take inspiration from Ursula K. Le Guin, Lev Grossman, and other writers for whom criticism itself constitutes a creative act.

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

Comedy as genre, mode, and tradition in drama, narrative, prose, film and stand-up comic performance. Examples from the ancient world include Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and The Menaechmi  by Plautus (Shakespeare’s source for Comedy of Errors).  We will also study one additional Shakespeare comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest  (Oscar Wilde, play and film), a Jane Austen novel and film adaptation, City Lights with Charlie Chaplin, Bringing Up Baby, Some Like it Hot, The Apartment, and Dr. Strangelove.  Theories of comedy will include works by Henri Bergson, Northrop Frye, Sigmund Freud.

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

Introduction to literary works associated with existentialism, a nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical movement known for its exploration of fundamental questions about the individual in modernity. Existentialist writers, artists, and philosophers focused on what it means that human beings exist finitely, oriented towards their own death; to what extent free will and reason are or are not governing principles of existence and action; how an individual might live a meaningful life in a society that itself is sick, illogical, absurd or without meaning; how catastrophes and the devastations of war upend understandings of ethics; and what forms of sensation adequately describe the contemporary human experience—waiting, disgust, nausea, anguish, anxiety, estrangement and alienation, confusion or boredom, or perhaps radical doubt? This course explores the aesthetic languages that existentialist writers and artists deployed to think through these fundamental questions, ones with which twenty-first-century thinkers are still grappling.

Works include Sartre, Nausea and No Exit; Camus, The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus; Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground; Beckett, Waiting for Godot; Kafka, The Trial and Metamorphosis; Hesse, Steppenwolf; Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; short stories by Kate Chopin; aphorisms by Nietzsche; and selected contemporary novels and films.

Prereq: none
2-0-4 Can be repeated for credit

With The Prelude, William Wordsworth invented a new genre, the autobiographical epic in verse. It was the poet’s masterpiece, but also a deeply personal work by a private man, and withheld from publication until his death in 1850. Wordsworth’s poem was to be the introductory portion of a tripartite epic project that was never completed in the poet’s lifetime. The poem presents a narrative of college life in the “other” Cambridge, and the record of a young man’s experience being caught up in the momentous political events of his day, especially the cataclysm of the French Revolution. Above all, Wordsworth’s poem is a psychologically astute and wholly modern account of “the growth of a poet’s mind.” We will read the poem in its earliest version of 1799, and in the full-length, 13-book version that Wordsworth completed in 1805. We will in addition read short works by predecessors and contemporaries (John Milton, Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge) to understand better the literary contexts of this powerful and enigmatic work.

Ends Oct. 20

Prereq: 21L.011 or permission of instructor
3-0-9 HASS-H; Can be repeated for credit

Suspense makes us wait for something.  Many films elide or reshape time to help us anticipate what happens, but the suspense film focuses even more on when it happens.  The film is structured around a future event that depends upon an interval.  This unsettled, suspended time points toward time itself, and to our own time as we, necessarily, wait for it to end.  In this course we will study a range of films that seem to use this form of unsettled time.  These works might include thrillers, mysteries and horror films, but also films about dancing, dreaming, and waiting by directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Pedro Almodóvar, Luis Buñuel, Agnès Varda, Quentin Tarantino, Jennifer Kent, Mary Harron, Henri-Georges Clouzot, and Jean-Pierre Melville.

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H

This subject examines the ways in which we read. It introduces some of the different strategies of reading, comprehending and engaging with literary texts developed in the twentieth century, paying especial attention to poststructuralist theories and their legacy. The course is organised around specific theoretical paradigms. In general, we will: (1) work through the selected reading in order to see how it determines or defines the task of literary interpretation; (2) locate the limits of each particular approach; and (3) trace the emergence of subsequent theoretical paradigms as responses to the achievements and limitations of what came before. The literary texts and films accompanying the theoretical material will serve as concrete cases that allow us to see theory in action. For the most part, each week will pair a text or film with a particular interpretative approach, using the former to explore the latter. Rather than attempting a definitive or full analysis of the literary or filmic work, we will exploit it (unashamedly – and indeed sometimes reductively) to understand better the theoretical reading it accompanies.

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H

This course will focus on LGBT literature from the late nineteenth century to the present with an emphasis on fiction and poetry. In particular, we will analyze how LGBT identities and their literary representations have changed over time. Our discussion will give special attention to the ways in which race, class, and disability intersect with sexuality and gender. Some of the authors we will read include James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Delany, Tony Kushner, Audre Lorde, Alison Bechdel, and Leslie Feinberg.

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

Introduces rudiments of Greek to students with little or no prior knowledge of the subject. Aimed at laying a foundation to begin reading ancient and/or medieval literary and historical texts. Greek I and Greek II may be combined by petition (after completion of both) to count as a single HASS Elective.

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.

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

This course studies some of the most important social conflicts in the Spanish-speaking world through fiction, poetry, essays, film and popular culture.   We will examine the Mexican and Cuban Revolutions; the Spanish Civil War; the military dictatorships in Argentina and Chile; the drug wars in Mexico and Colombia; indigenous rights in Guatemala and Peru; women’s and LGBT movements across the region.  Offered in Spanish.

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

We think of the digital age as a time of tremendous innovation in literary technology, producing new authors on a mass scale, as well as preserving and curating older books. This explosion in the technologies of reading is not, however, unprecedented. Because of disadvantageous copyright laws, nineteenth-century American writers had to find creative devices for producing, protecting, and disseminating their work: whether through private presses or self-printing (Walt Whitman and eventually Herman Melville), manuscript self-publication (Emily Dickinson), the networks of popular magazines (Harriet Beecher Stowe and Fanny Fern) or uses of public lectures, journalism, and photography for self-marketing (Frederick Douglass and Mark Twain). This class will examine the “literary methods” of American authors looking for readers. In order to understand these nineteenth-century innovations, we will also investigate 21st-century critical methods that have created sophisticated digital tools for reading the past. Students will assess different textual forms—manuscript, print, maps, photographs, illustrations, circulars—using the hands-on affordances of both old-fashioned libraries and state-of-the art digital databases. No technical expertise required.

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

What makes a play or a musical a smash hit? In this course, we will dive deep into the history of four American blockbusters: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Annie, and Hamilton. Comparing source material to scripts, scripts to accounts of performances, and performances to film adaptations, we will explore how popular narratives shift over time and across genres. Using time-honored and cutting-edge strategies for doing research in the humanities, we will investigate these shows’ ties to prior popular forms, such as minstrel shows and comic strips. Since all four of these dramas are focused around figures who oscillate in some way between categories such as child and adult, male and female, rich and poor, or black and white, we will think together about what it means to conceive of identity categories themselves as fluid and performative.

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 novels and plays (including Shakespeare) and films based on other films.  Films and texts include: Blade Runner/Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The Big Sleep, The Big Lebowski, The Hours/Mrs. Dalloway, A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, X [Malcolm X]/Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Man Who Knew Too Much and others.