Subjects Taught by Semester

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-HW
Topics: Improves Close Reading, Improves Oral Communication, Is Writing-Intensive, Thinks about Gender or Sexuality, Thinks about Popular Culture, Thinks about Race or Class, Thinks about Science, Technology, Environment, Thinks about Social Justice Issues, Works with Visual Materials/Film/Media

The word ‘monster’ derives from the Latin verb monere, “to show or admonish.” In other words, monsters begin as meaningful creatures–as signs to be read, as warnings. Through intensive weekly reading and writing assignments, this course will look at literature centered on monstrous figures to think about two things; the first: how do monsters like devilish magicians and mad scientists show (or de-monstrate) the fears, anxieties, and problems of specific cultural moments throughout history? The second: what are we to make of the fact that, while monsters are often objects of terror, they are also frequently sympathetic figures, vibrant fictional characters whose complexity seems to protest the fear they are (supposedly) meant to inspire? Indeed, many of the monsters we will cover are, to some readers, the heroes of their stories. By reading literature in genres ranging from 16th century English drama to the 19th century Gothic novel to contemporary American horror fiction, this course will help you to understand literature’s rich, ongoing, and ambivalent tradition of making monsters.

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-H
Topics: Improves Close Reading, Improves Oral Communication, Is Writing-Intensive, Thinks about Gender or Sexuality, Thinks about Popular Culture, Thinks about Race or Class, Thinks about Social Justice Issues

Voyages inspire literary works; fiction often relies upon metaphors of travel and discovery. This class examines the voyage as a mythic idea that shapes literary forms and fantasies, tests social, racial, geographical, and historical boundaries, and reckons with migration and navigating a dangerous world. Readings will consider structural themes of literary voyages and their consequences: for example, the uses of shipwreck (Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno); monsters (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy); journeys out (Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West); and ambiguous return (Stephanie Powell Watts’s No One is Coming to Save Us, Tommy Orange’s There There). While attending to broad thematic outlines, we will also observe details, the texture of literary engagement with the world—in the play of language, the liberation of narrative voice, and the remaking of experience in words.

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-H
Topics: Improves Close Reading, Improves Oral Communication, Is Writing-Intensive, Thinks about Race or Class

How do you read a poem?  Many people find poetry “difficult” – sometimes pleasurably and sometimes less so. But within that category of the difficult resides much that is of use and of value to us as readers and human beings.  Among the goals of the class we will be developing and practicing some of the skills, habits, and knowledge to approach poetic texts – difficult or otherwise – so that you can judge for yourselves what they mean for you.  We’ll take a close look at the nature of evidence that can be used for thinking and talking about poetry:  the formal properties of poetic language as well the use of context. We’ll read a wide variety of poetry from 1900 through the present, with some glances further back, and we will explore a variety of tools and approaches, from the old (memorization, listening, and reading out loud) to the new (digitally enabled visualization and annotation).  Most of our reading will be in modern English, so that we can focus on how poets work with its particular properties and affordances, but any knowledge of other languages can be a valuable resource to contribute to our discussion. The last two weeks of the semester will focus on readings chosen and presented by the class.

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-H
Topics: Improves Close Reading, Improves Oral Communication, Includes Critical Theory, Is Writing-Intensive, Thinks about Popular Culture, Thinks about Race or Class, Thinks about Science, Technology, Environment, Thinks about Social Justice Issues

Climate crisis and COVID-19 are a forceful reminder of the entangled lives of everyone and everything on the planet. This class turns to contemporary literature to think through ways of living together that exceed the imagination of Capitalism, an economic system that will only ever put profit before life.

We will think about issues of social justice, such as environmental racism and the use of Indigenous lands for nuclear mining, waste, or weapons testing. We will also think about stories that place non-human characters at their centre (some examples include: mushrooms, a piece of plastic waste at sea, the planet itself). And we will read a range of novels, poems, and short stories that use the imaginative potential of fiction to try and envision mutually sustaining modes of togetherness.

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-HW
Topics: Improves Close Reading, Improves Oral Communication, Includes Hands-on Projects or Making, Is Writing-Intensive, Studies Adaptations or Translations, Thinks about Gender or Sexuality, Thinks about Race or Class, Thinks about Social Justice Issues, Works with Visual Materials/Film/Media

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—critically, creatively, 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 the comedy Much Ado About Nothing and the tragedy Othello, and perform dramatic scenes from what is now a ‘problem play’, The Merchant of Venice. We will look at how Shakespeare revises his stories and style, including in the late ‘romance,’ A Winter’s Tale, and at how his plays have in turn been reinterpreted across the globe. In the process, we will debate the reasons for Shakespeare’s enduring power. Nevertheless, our aim is less to appreciate his works as an end in themselves than to draw on his remarkable drama (including its vocabulary, variety, verve, 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-H, CI-H

Explores the fascinating history, culture, and society of the ancient and medieval worlds and the different methodologies scholars use to interpret them. Wrestles with big questions about the diversity of life and thought in pre-modern societies, the best ways to study the distant past, and the nature (and limitations) of knowledge about long-ago eras. Considers a wide range of scholarly subjects such as the rise and fall of the Roman empire, the triumph of Christianity and Islam, barbarian invasions and holy wars, courts and castles, philosophy and religion, and the diversity of art, literature, and politics. Ponders different types of evidence, reads across a variety of disciplines, and develops skills to identify continuities and changes in ancient and medieval societies.

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-H
Topics: Improves Close Reading, Improves Oral Communication, Is Writing-Intensive, Thinks about Gender or Sexuality, Thinks about Race or Class, Works with Visual Materials/Film/Media

Fiction writers are masters of the art of deception.  They lie all the time.  It should come as no surprise, then, that some of their most enduring (and sometimes endearing) characters are themselves liars, swindlers, rogues, and criminals.  This course will introduce you to European and Latin American fiction through a selection of its most memorable lowlifes.  We will examine how novels, short stories, graphic novels, and films use these outsiders and their transgressions to challenge societal norms and structures, particularly economic inequality, patriarchy, colonialism, and racism.  Some of the works we will analyze and discuss are the Lazarillo de Tormes, Voltaire’s Candide, Machado de Assis’s The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, Jorge Luis Borges’s A Universal History of Infamy, Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star. Class projects will include the opportunity for students to create—using various media—their own lowlife characters.

Prereq: none
2-0-4 Can be repeated for credit
Topics: Thinks about Popular Culture

(Ends Oct. 15th) David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest is a “Big Book” in a number of senses. One of the masterpieces of postmodern American fiction, the novel is regularly found on best-of lists for the last quarter or half century. It is a novel of colossal proportions and equally massive ambitions, with a large cast of characters and frequently shifting perspectives and times. Infinite Jest is a novel whose maximalism, overwhelming at times, reflects the enormity and chaos of the world it describes. Both clear-eyed and fabulist, probing and problematic, the novel addresses geopolitical conflict, ecological crisis, information overload, postirony, addiction and recovery, and more.

Infinite Jest is placed in a number of settings, but much of its action takes place in the greater Boston area. Some of the local sites DFW describes are now gone, some are imaginary or partly imagined, and many are still around, including some landmarks on the MIT campus. Students will have the opportunity to generate site-specific readings through exploratory trips into the community and/or virtual mapping of the novel.

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H
Topics: Improves Close Reading, Improves Oral Communication, Studies Adaptations or Translations, Thinks about Gender or Sexuality, Thinks about Popular Culture, Thinks about Race or Class, Works with Archives, Works with Visual Materials/Film/Media

Film and other media adaptations present a powerful artistic, philosophical, political, interpretative tool, to broaden or to focus our experience of a given text. In this course, we will examine adaptations of Shakespeare plays on a global, multicultural, and broad historical scale, emphasizing problems of representations of race, sexuality, and power, both in terms of “authoritative” and experimental adaptations.

Taking into account a rich history of performance, we will explore Shakespeare plays across film and other media forms, both old and new, with an emphasis on cultural and political context. In addition to film adaptations of plays such as Hamlet, King Lear, The Tempest, Coriolanus, and Othello, we will also turn to online hypertext and interactive projects to pose the question of how far a viewer may be implicated in the reception of a given adaptation.

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H
Topics: Improves Close Reading, Improves Oral Communication, Involves Creative Writing, Is Writing-Intensive, Studies Adaptations or Translations, Thinks about Gender or Sexuality, Thinks about Popular Culture, Thinks about Race or Class, Thinks about Social Justice Issues, Works with Archives, Works with Visual Materials/Film/Media

For most North Americans, “Nature” is a place. And a system, a dynamic of interlocking systems in a space. And a “trace”: we need a historical sense in order address what is “natural” to us. Nature is a grounding material reality and a field of questioning. It is what our senses register: a body of forms we invent; a program of metaphors and projections; and a process of making metaphors and futures. It is both an autobiographical condition [where we come from] and an “end” outside ourselves. Especially in American traditions, “nature” is a grounding-place and a promise: a frontier, a sublimation, a map, a battleground, a home, a resource, an Emerald Necklace, an Oversoul, and a back-yard. American literary texts often question the “nature” of nature: landscape is a defining element of the formation of American identities in several American traditions of verbal and visual arts. 

In this intermediate subject, we consider verbal and visual texts in which the physical world is a participating element in our histories and social formations and even in our individual and social selves. We read “creation-myths” [from Hopi and Wampanoag and Hebrew traditions], works by 19th century Transcendentalist writers [R. W. Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Frederick Douglass, Black Hawk], by writers of the early 20th century [Zora Neale Hurston, Sara Orne Jewett, Robert Frost, Robinson Jeffers, John Steinbeck] and of the later 20th century [Elizabeth Bishop, Lauren Savoy, Heid Erdrich, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sherman Alexie, Lucille Clifton, Louise Glück, Camille Dunghy]. We’ll consider several ideological patterns of an “American ecological” aesthetic, in cultural theory [F. J. Turner, Leo Marx, Laurence Buell, Annette Kolodny], in painting and photos [the Hudson River School, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Eakins, Sally Mann]. We’ll wonder whether “Nature” is a Eurocentric or anthropocentric formulation, and what such a characterization might mean; and consider the continuities [and discontinuities] among “Nature poetry,” “ecopoetics,” and the texts of a “Ecological Justice” commitment… and we’ll question what “home” means in these contexts.

Prereq: none
3-0-9 H
Topics: Improves Close Reading, Includes Critical Theory, Thinks about Popular Culture, Thinks about Race or Class, Thinks about Science, Technology, Environment, Thinks about Social Justice Issues, Works with Visual Materials/Film/Media

During the first years of the HIV/AIDS crisis, in the eighties and early nineties, activists protested across major cities demanding government action, some of them still hooked up to IV drips and oxygen tanks; alongside them, writers, visual artists, and filmmakers continued creating, many up until their last breath.  This course examines the relationship between different forms of cultural expression—from art to activism—during those first fifteen years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, prior to the advent of highly active antiretroviral therapy. In particular, we will analyze the way in which mainstream narratives about the disease associated it with Blackness and queerness.  With a focus on the work of Black queer and trans creators and activists, we will also study how literature, film, and visual art were mobilized against these mainstream narratives in order to effect changes in public consciousness and even policy. Finally, we will discuss the legacy of these cultural responses, particularly as it pertains to communities of color. We will do so through close readings across a variety of genres and media: fiction, poetry, film, theater, television, journalism, popular music, painting, sculpture, performance, and installation art. Some of the works we will analyze include: Samuel Delany’s The Tale of Plagues and Carnival; Octavia Butler’s Fledgling; Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother; Sapphire’s Push and its screen adaptation Precious; the films of Marlon Riggs; and the latest season of the television series Pose. 

Prereq: Permission of instructor
3-0-9 HASS-H; Can be repeated for credit
Topics: Improves Close Reading, Thinks about Gender or Sexuality, Thinks about Popular Culture, Thinks about Race or Class, Thinks about Social Justice Issues, Works with Visual Materials/Film/Media

In this course we will read novels that try to think about storytelling in terms of collective as opposed to individual striving. What do novels that try to veer away from creating or focusing on a singular hero have to suggest about possibilities for building solidarity? How does a writer craft a novel that depends on the characters’ interdependence with one another? Do we learn anything (new, different, interesting, or useful) from a novel’s attempt to encourage us to unlearn relying solely on one protagonist for readerly pleasure and understanding? What particular novels explore the ways in which this very attempt—while laudable—can fail miserably or even comically? These are just some of the questions we will attempt to answer in reading the following texts: William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930), George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), Edward Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1997), Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You (2014), and Tommy Orange’s There There (2018)

Prereq: none
3-0-3; first half of term
Topics: Improves Close Reading

(Ends Oct. 15th) Introduces rudiments of ancient Greek – the language of Plato, Sophocles, Thucydides, and Euclid, and the basis for that of the New Testament – to students with little or no prior knowledge of the subject. Aimed at laying a foundation to begin reading ancient and/or medieval texts. Greek I and Greek II may be combined (after completion of both) to count as a single HASS-H.

Prereq: none
2-0-4 HASS-H

(Ends Oct. 15th) Read Latin literature in the original language! 21L.613 serves as a bridge for students with at least one semester or more of formal Latin training (Latin I/II, high school Latin, or equivalent) between the study of Latin grammar and vocabulary and the reading of Latin authors. The topic for Fall 2021 will be selections from Cicero’s philosophical writings and letters. 21L.614 Advanced Latin Reading will run simultaneously with 21L.613 and each may be repeated once for credit.

Prereq: One intermediate subject in Spanish or permission of instructor
3-0-9 HASS-H
Topics: Improves Close Reading, Improves Oral Communication, Is Taught in Spanish, Thinks about Gender or Sexuality, Thinks about Race or Class, Thinks about Social Justice Issues, Works with Visual Materials/Film/Media

This course introduces students to the literature and cinema of contemporary Spain and Latin America. By becoming familiar with the historical, political, and cultural settings that shaped these texts and films, we will consider what, if anything, makes them uniquely Hispanic. What links the Old World with the New? How has Spain envisioned its place within Western Europe? How has Latin America defined itself in relationship to its northern neighbor? Some of the authors and filmmakers we will discuss include Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Roberto Bolaño, Luis Buñuel, and Pedro Almodovar. The course is conducted in Spanish, and all reading and writing will be in Spanish.

Prereq: Two subjects in Literature
3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-M; Can be repeated for credit
Topics: Improves Close Reading, Improves Oral Communication, Includes Hands-on Projects or Making, Involves Creative Writing, Is Writing-Intensive, Studies Adaptations or Translations, Thinks about Popular Culture, Thinks about Race or Class, Thinks about Science, Technology, Environment, Works with Visual Materials/Film/Media

A literary genre has materialized in the past fifteen years that, as Marco Roth (with some notoriety) puts it, is marked by “the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel — the novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind.” This category of narrative documents the workings and misfirings of the mind alongside emerging ideas of a new means of accessing and dramatizing interiority. Works marked as neuro-novels include novels by Ian McEwan, Jonathan Lethem, Mark Haddon, Richard Powers, Rivka Galchen, Haruki Murakami, and John Wray. We will also consider the picture of a currently unmapped but potentially fully knowable brain; what would such a model of the mind do to ideas of agency, selfhood, and even free will? This course will use the aforementioned texts and others alongside films such as Je T’aime, Je T’aime; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; and Inside Out, to explore how fiction considers what is problematic about a direct identification between mind and brain.

Prereq: Two subjects in Literature
3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-M; Can be repeated for credit
Topics: Improves Close Reading, Improves Oral Communication, Thinks about Gender or Sexuality, Thinks about Race or Class

This class studies three major works by two classic novelists of the English language.  It focuses on a critical decade in the history of the novel: 1870-1880.

We’ll begin with one of the greatest novels of them all: George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72), a masterpiece of fictional realism depicting the intricate webs of connection binding people together in community and history. Next we’ll examine Eliot’s subsequent (and last) novel, Daniel Deronda (1874-76), which pushes the boundaries of realism, exploring territory hitherto uncharted by this type of fiction. Last we’ll take up Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1880), a novel that rewrites the basic plot of Deronda in attempt to set the novel genre on a different course – toward Modernism, with its explorations in psychology (“stream of consciousness”) and formal experimentation.

Student work will involve frequent short response papers on readings, a brief oral report or two, and a creative project at the semester’s end.

Prereq: Two subjects in Literature or permission of instructor
3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-M; Can be repeated for credit
Topics: Improves Close Reading, Improves Oral Communication, Is Writing-Intensive, Thinks about Gender or Sexuality, Thinks about Popular Culture, Thinks about Race or Class, Thinks about Science, Technology, Environment, Thinks about Social Justice Issues

The image of early “America” as a pastoral garden in the wilderness has proven durable yet, given developments in environmental science, history, and ecocriticism – complicated and difficult to sustain. This class examines the history and literature of early US attempts at managing, even comprehending, its natural resources. Toni Morrison’s A Mercy frames our study of the long history of Native American and African land use that was labeled witchcraft by authors like Mary Rowlandson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and, more obliquely, Frederick Douglass. Ideas growing out of European natural history and based in observation, collecting, and taxonomy pitted Louis Agassiz against Charles Darwin and inspired Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville. Scientific methods drawing on botany and herbalism underwrote radical thinking in Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, and Sarah Orne Jewett. As understanding of the deep historical roots of human impact on global environments emerges in the twenty-first century, these authors’ attempts to grapple with environmental challenges for which they were poorly prepared become newly relevant. Readings in a wide range of literary, historical, and scientific texts will allow students to assemble a critical archive of resources for rethinking US nature writing in the Anthropocene.