Subjects Taught by Semester

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

Do you like to mark up your books (even if your teachers tell you not to)? Then you are already writing about literature. This class will explore what writing about literature is like for authors themselves. Through the ways they borrow stories and genres, writers reflect surprisingly on the creative process itself. Examples include:

• William Shakespeare lifting from Arthur Brooke’s verse narrative in writing Romeo and Juliet;
• Mary Shelley reshaping epic, scripture, science nonfiction, and her husband’s poems to make Frankenstein;
• Herman Melville adapting an entertaining travel book into a Gothic novella in Benito Cereno;
• Alison Bechdel rewriting Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in her graphic novel Fun Home.

Assignments and group projects will allow students to explore the writing process using Annotation Studio, a digital annotation tool developed in MIT’s HyperStudio. Writing in margins strongly encouraged.

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

How do authors read, absorb, and write about their times? And how do we understand times long gone? In this introduction to reading fiction, we will look at pairs of writers whose concerns overlap and whose works can help us understand their histories and our own. Such pairings include authors: testing their national and ethnic boundaries (Junot Diaz’s Drown and James Joyce’s Dubliners); feeling at the mercy of unsettling historical change (Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway); and journeying across great empires of the past (Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies and E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India). Discussion and assignments will focus on how novels and short stories negotiate crucial events as they shape ordinary human experience.

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

Drama might be described as a game played with something sacred. It tells stories that go right to the heart of what people believe about themselves. And it is enacted in the moment, which means it has an added layer of interpretive mystery and playfulness, or “theatricality.” This introductory course will explore theater and theatricality across periods and cultures, through intensive engagement with performance texts. We will study and discuss plays that exemplify different kinds of dramatic structure, and class members will also attend and review dramatic performances and have a chance to perform scenes on their own. In addition to modern and contemporary plays, readings will range from ancient Greece to Medieval England, Renaissance Spain, and Classical Japan.

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

We will focus on three or four plays by Shakespeare, drawn from different genres. Close reading of the texts will be accompanied by examining how they have been adapted and performed around the world, on film and in theatre. Students will watch different versions of the plays chosen, reflecting upon how staging them in different ways and contexts changes our understanding of the texts and their cultural impact. We may also attend one or more theatrical performances, depending on what is available in the Boston area in the Spring semester. Plays selected will probably include: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, The Tempest, King Lear, and Hamlet.

Prereq: none
3-3-6 HASS-A, CI-H

This subject will examine a series of classic films by American and European directors, with emphasis on the historical evolution of the film medium and on the cultural and artistic importance of individual films. The course will be organized in three segments: 1. The Silent Era (films by Griffith, Chaplin, Keaton, Murnau); 2. Hollywood Genres (Hitchcock, Ford, Kelly, Fosse, Altman); and 3. International Masters (Renoir, De Sica, Truffaut, Kurosawa). All films will be shown on Tuesday evenings and will be available on demand via computer for registered students. Two lectures, one recitation meeting per week. Lectures are held on Tuesdays, 4-5 pm and 7-8 pm. Both are required. The week’s screening follows the evening lecture.

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

This class considers comedy in drama, narrative, and film spanning more than 2000 years, drawing examples from narrative or dramatic works of literature and pairing them as well as we can with examples drawn from film. We will investigate the comedy of manners in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Frank Capra’s film, It Happened One Night; study the comedy of humors in Moliere’s The Misanthrope and Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day; try to understand the uneasy relationships between farce and romantic love in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and Billy Wilder’s film Some Like It Hot; analyze the comedy of the grotesque in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Carl Reiner’s film All of Me; look into the workings of satire in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove; consider the anarchy of screwball comedy in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, part I and Howard Hawks’ Bringing up Baby. We will touch upon the connections between violence and redemptive humor, satire and festivity, while noting certain fundamentals: an interest in the body as object and source of rebellious pleasure; a pattern of transgression against social norms corrected and reordered through laughter; a fascination with the possibilities and limits of verbal play; a concern with real and mistaken identity; an opportunity for political protest and social reform. As the class develops, we will note the ways writers appropriate and reshape comic plots and structures from the past for new uses, and we will read and discuss philosophic investigations of the sources of comic effect in works by Aristotle, Freud, Northrop Frye, and others.

This is a H, CI-H class. As in other communications-intensive classes, students to produce 20 pages of writing in three assignments, plus a required revision. They also have substantial opportunities for oral expression, through student-led discussion and in-class reports. The class has a low enrollment to ensure maximum attention to student writing and oral expression, and a writing advisor is available for consultation on drafts and revisions.

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

Overturn the government. Invent your own belief system. Go blind. Then rewrite “Genesis,” and reimagine the origins of everything: culture, knowledge, gender, human beings, and the universe. That’s the story behind John Milton’s Paradise Lost: the greatest epic poem written in English.

The focus of the class will be on reading and discussion of Milton’s text. We will also use and interact with supporting materials generated by students in the concurrent subject, Literature from Anywhere: an Engineer’s Guide to “Paradise Lost” (21L.518). Work will include frequent, informal writing, leading discussions, one or two short quizzes, and user feedback on the Engineer’s Guide materials.

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

This Sampling explores the films of the great and extremely influential American director Stanley Kubrick. The course will closely study films from across his career, ranging from 1956 to 1987, and spanning genres including noir, the war film, satire, science fiction and horror. Our focus will be on Kubrick’s extraordinary formal language—his use of color, staging, editing, choreographed camerawork, and his extraordinary manipulations of sound and music. We will analyze his use of satire, parody, irony, his stylistic deployment of photography, theatricality, and reflexivity, and his complex relationship to war, violence, gender, and sexuality.

Films will include:

Full Metal Jacket (1987)
The Shining (1980)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Lolita (1962)
The Killing (1956)

* Weekly screening, weekly seminar meeting; meets for the first half of the semester.

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

Who were the Harry Potters of the mid-nineteenth and early-twentieth century? In this course, we will study children’s texts that achieved such huge popular acclaim that many of them continue to be refashioned into new forms—films, musicals, graphic novels—to this day. Focusing on famous characters such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Barrie’s Peter Pan, and Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie, we will read, watch, or listen to multiple versions of their adventures, in order to explore how the representation of these intensely appealing children shifts over time and across genres.

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H

All narrative fiction, even the most realistic, takes place in an alternative reality, a world in which the nature of events and the possibilities of human action are, to some degree or other, different from our own. A realistic work of fiction tries to minimize the difference; a work of fantasy flaunts it. In this subject we will investigate the character of alternative realities in works that do the flaunting, starting with some classics of Western literature (Homer’s Odyssey, Shakespeare’ The Tempest, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland) and then consider a variety of modern kinds, horror fiction, ghost stories, tales of the uncanny, and works of “magic realism” of the sort typified by Kafka, Marquez, Borges, and Pynchon. Ultimately we will lay emphasis upon the most prominent newcomer to the fantastic and possibly its rival, science fiction. We will have two goals: first, to study how the alternative character of a fantastic world leads to these different genres; and second, to study how science fiction differs from other fantastic genres and perhaps from fantasy itself. The subject will also consider developments in film (Metropolis, The Wizard of Oz, Blade Runner, Groundhog Day, Source Code, Inception).

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

“Well behaved women rarely make history,” as they say. Nor do they often make it into the pages of novels where we’re far more likely to find scheming women, defiant women, abandoned women, seduced women, dangerous women—and an occasional good one, too. As we read and discuss important examples of what has become one of, if not the most widely read literary genre today—the novel—we’ll pay particular attention to the role played by women and consider such questions as: Why are they called “novels”? Who wrote them? Who read them? Who narrates them? What are they likely to be about? Do they have distinctive characteristics? What is their relationship to the time and place in which they appeared? And, most of all, why do we like them so much? Authors might include: Daniel Defoe, Frances Burney, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Thomas Hardy, Sylvia Townshend-Warner.

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

This course is aimed at students who enjoy reading and thinking seriously about the writing of our own era. A modest sampling of significant contemporary English language novelists and poets, the course will center on the ways these writers dramatize personal traumas, moral problems, and the relation of individuals to the social and political order. Other related questions: How do contemporary writers challenge and try to break free of the immense burden of literary tradition? How do they find an authentic personal voice? What is their attitude to questions of form and design? Fiction writers and poets who may be included: Lydia Davis, Louise Gluck, Linda Gregerson, Russell Hoban, Jhumpa Lahiri, Robert Pinksy, Arundhati Roy.

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

This class introduces students to a variety of works by contemporary women writers from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Emphasis is placed on determining to what extent each writer’s work and her literary style reflects her distinct cultural heritage and to what extent, if any, we can identify a voice that transcends national cultures. In our discussions, we examine the patterns of socialization of women in patriarchal cultures, how in the imaginary and real world we adapt or rebel, the relationship of the characters to love and work, the search for identity and both the authors’ and the characters’ thoughts on sex roles, marriage, and politics. Films are an integral part of the course. Readings include novels, short stories, essays, and graphic novels.

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

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

This subject provides a comprehensive and critical overview of the literary and scholarly work of the inimitable writer Toni Morrison. Morrison’s novels are well known for being stylistically dense and sometimes emotionally difficult to read and understand. But to borrow Morrison’s own words, from The Bluest Eye, the semester-long exercise of reading, thinking, and writing about her work promises to be “a productive and fructifying pain.” As we allow ourselves the opportunity to meditate on her writings, during the course of the semester, we will open ourselves to the possibility of growing more intellectually conscious not only as readers, writers, and thinkers in the classroom, but also as compassionate citizens out in the world. We will read all ten of her novels, some of her speeches, her short story “Recitatif,” and critical essays about her work.

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

To look at the full rich vista of poetry in the last 100 years, we need a wide lens. We’d need to account not only for the accomplishments and influences of canonical Anglo-American Modernism, but also to look at what happened to the Modern/lyrical impulse in other places, other languages, other traditions. Some promising beginnings were cut short [Oscar Wilde and Wilfred Owen in England, Georg Trakl in Austria]. Some movements developed and thrived, though they might have been underappreciated by contemporaries [Gertrude Stein in Paris, Langston Hughes in Mexico City and New York, Aime Cesaire in Martinique]. Some met absolutist obstacles with bravery and joy [Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova in Russia, Nazim Hikmet in Turkey]. Some took the question itself as their theme and their formal determinant (Constantine Cavafy in Greece and north Africa, Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz in Poland).

Readings in English / translation. Class format: seminar, conversations, short papers, and presentations.

Enrollment limited to 12 students.