Subjects Taught by Semester

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

The short-story writer Alice Munro accepted the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature expressing her “hope [that] this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.” In this class, we’ll take Munro at her word and read a variety of short stories by writers including Amy Tan, Raymond Carver, John Updike, Tim O’Brien, Jamaica Kincaid, Sandra Cisneros, and Alice Munro herself. Of course reading stories for the sheer pleasure of it is one thing; thinking about what they might mean is another; expressing those thoughts in writing is still another. In this class, we’ll be doing all three. The goal will be to increase enjoyment in reading and in understanding, as well as to feel more confident in the ability to express oneself effectively, efficiently, and gracefully.

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, and ready to talk about them seriously.

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

An introduction to poetry in English. We will explore poems written during several periods and in several genres (nature-poems, narratives, the epic, sonnets, odes, experimental forms).  Focus will be less on names and dates than on tactics of analytic reading. Poets whose work we’ll read include William Shakespeare, John Keats, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Liyoung Lee, and many others. Special course-related events (readings, lectures, film screenings) will take place on selected evenings throughout the term. Regular classroom hours will be reduced in the weeks for which a special event is scheduled.

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

This term Shakespeare (21L.009) approaches some of the playwright’s most enduring works through close reading of the text(s) and through their vibrant and varied afterlife in performance and on film, including scenes from productions from across the world in the MIT Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive. In addition to several papers, work for the subject will include class discussion, notes on each play, and short student presentations. Focuses on the reading of six to eight of Shakespeare’s plays, as well as their adaptation for stage and/or film. Selected texts cover the range of genres in which Shakespeare wrote (i.e., history, comedy, tragedy, and romance). Special emphasis in some terms on performances and adaptations of Shakespearean drama around the world. Plays studied vary term to term, and have recently included  A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and The Tempest. We may also attend one or more theatrical performances, depending on what is available in the Boston area during the semester.

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
3-0-6 HASS-H, CI-H

This subject examines the cultural, artistic, social, and political impact of globalization across international borders in a historical context. Novels and short stories as well as case studies on global health, human trafficking, and labor migration illuminate the shaping influence of contemporary globalization on gender, race, ethnicity, and class. Guest lecturers visit class as we examine the impact of globalization on cultural identity, the arts, the politics of language, and the media. How has migration changed notions of cultural and racial hybridity? What can we learn from specific examples of global media and expressive culture including popular music and film? In what ways has globalization affected human rights? Students develop sensitivity to other cultures and the ability to read broadly across national boundaries. Furthermore, the emphasis on the historical context gives students a foundation to continue work in literature, history, and the arts from a global perspective.

Prereq: none
3-1-8 HASS-A, CI-H

This subject will introduce students to some of the folk music of the British Isles and North America and to some of the scholarship as well as the folklore about it. We will examine the musical qualities of “folk poetry” -particularly the old narrative Scottish and English ballads. We will try to understand the historical contexts in which folk music was a precious part of everyday life. We will survey how, when and why folk music began to be collected, beginning in the 18th century with broadsides, Percy’s Reliques, and Sir Walter Scott’s collections -and how it changed the course of literary history. We will compare the instrumental styles and sung ballads as they migrated from the U.K. to North America- with their attendant changes and continuities. We will examine the great confluence of African- American musics and texts with these European ones to create U.S folk music. We hope to conclude with the “folk revivals” in the USA and Britain in the 1950’s and 1960’s, although we usually don’t manage to get that far.

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

This class examines novels that trouble the boundaries between nations or states. In books by bestselling authors such as Art Spiegelman, Edwidge Danticat, Louise Erdrich, Mohsin Hamid, and Ruth Ozeki, we encounter stories of global itinerancy, questions about identity, family, and the past, and narratives of a search for home. Some of these themes may seem familiar to readers of “ethnic,” “immigration,” or “coming-of-age” stories.  At the same time, these works often break through established or familiar boundaries, engaging with terror, violence, and risk at the borders of self, nation, and literary form. In works by Spiegelman, Danticat, and Erdrich, characters experience conflicts between home and nation as they move toward identifying as “American.” Characters in works by Hamid and Ozeki more fully inhabit “America” before traveling physically or imaginatively away from the US to “home” countries. These different dynamics make visible the complexities of life at borders and draw attention to different literary strategies as well.

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

A close study of landmark films of the 1970s, sometimes called Hollywood’s New Wave, when a new generation of actors and directors transformed American movies. Films by such directors and with such actors as Altman, Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg, Malick, others. This course requires heavy movie-viewing and selected reading in cultural history and film criticism.

All required films will be available for streaming to students’ laptops.

I aim for lively discussion from everyone. In addition to watching our week’s films, I expect students to have searched online for basic general information about our directors’ careers. We’ll begin each class with a brief overview of our director, and then work toward a close reading of the required films. In most weeks we’ll discuss two or three complex movies, so you must be truly prepared, familiar with the material, ready to talk seriously.

Prereq: One subject in Literature
3-0-9 HASS-H

This is your chance to read every word that Jane Austen ever wrote–not just her novels, but her earlier hilarious juvenilia, several unfinished fragments of novels, and the wonderful letters she wrote over her lifetime to her sister Cassandra. This great writer’s work will be examined in relation to both her biography and the historical period in which she lived and wrote. We will analyze Austen’s characteristic style and techniques, in order to gain an enhanced appreciation of her writing-its intelligence, its wit, and its themes. Because she was a serious satirist, we will also discuss her moral values, and in the process, become more familiar with the culture of eighteenth-century England and the place of women– and art– in it.

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.

Some of the 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.

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H

hƿæt ƿe gardena in geardagum þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon…

Those are the first words of the Old English epic Beowulf, and in this class you will learn to read them.

Besides being the language of Rohan in the novels of Tolkien, Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon) is a language of long, cold, and lonely winters; of haunting beauty found in unexpected places; and of unshakable resolve in the face of insurmountable odds. It is, in short, the perfect language for MIT students.

We will read greatest hits from the epic Beowulf as well as moving laments (The Wanderer, Wulf and Eadwacer, The Wife’s Lament), the personified Cross’s psychedelic and poignant account of the Crucifixion (The Dream of the Rood), and a host of riddles whose solutions range from the sacred to the obscene but are always ingenious.

Prereq: 21L.607 or permission of instructor
3-0-3; second half of term

Introductory Greek subject for students with some prior knowledge of basic grammar and vocabulary. Intended to refresh and enrich ability to read ancient and/or medieval literary and historical texts. May be taken independently of Greek I with permission of instructor. Greek I and Greek II may be combined by petition (after completion of both) to count as a single HASS Elective.

Prereq: none
2-0-4 HASS-H

Read Latin literature in the original language! This year our text will be selections from Petronius’ Satyricon, a comic novel about the misadventures of several disreputable characters, showing the decadent life on the Bay of Naples during the Age of Nero. 21L.613 serves as a bridge for students with one semester or more of formal Latin training (Latin 1/2, high school Latin, or equivalent) between the study of Latin grammar and vocabulary and the reading of Latin authors. 21L.614 starts Oct 17th and offers more of a challenge for advanced readers. They run simultaneously and each may be repeated once for credit.

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 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.

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: 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

“Ce n’est pas du sang, c’est du rouge.”
[ It’s not blood; it’s red. ] —Jean-Luc Godard

The history of film theory has been the history of ignoring color.  Treated as a minor detail,  ornament, or gimmick, and aligned with degraded cultural modes such as the feminine, the exotic, and the melodramatic, a rigorous aesthetics of color has only recently received due scholarly attention.

This seminar explores those aesthetic issues in addition to the affective, political, ethical and interpretive possibilities made available by taking color seriously.  Although we will briefly study innovations in color film cinematography (attending to early hand-tinted films and the development of Technicolor), our focus will be on theoretical questions: How have philosophers defined color and how have these accounts moved between chromophobia and chromophilia (deriding or fetishizing it)? How does a logic of color work in specific genres and modes (melodrama, horror, surrealism, animation)? How is color linked to desire, excess, and other formal areas including sound, duration, space and movement? How is color attached to specific (gendered,  raced) bodies? How is color linked to violence and how is color affectively provocative?

Readings from philosophers, art historians, and film theorists pair with films early and recent from all over the globe, including: The Wizard of Oz, Kill Bill,  Blue, Raise the Red Lantern, Sombre, Vertigo, Red Desert,  Fantasia, Written on the Wind, Schindler’s List, The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover, Blue is the Warmest Color, Contempt, Don’t Look Now, Three Colors Trilogy, and In the Mood for Love. In addition to the lecture, there will be an optional weekly four hour film screening.

Prerequisite: 21L.011, one subject in Literature or Comparative Media Studies; or permission of instructor.