Subjects Taught by Semester

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

Counterpoint: the technique of combining two or more melodic lines in such a way that they establish a harmonic relationship while retaining their linear individuality.  This term, we’ll be reading fiction as both independent and interdependent works. How do Junot Diaz and Sandra Cisneros’s story collections illuminate one another—or Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian novels? E.M. Forster and Jhumpa Lahiri’s cross-cultural narratives? Virginia Woolf and Ian McEwan’s 24-hour novels? In each case, the earlier work prepares us for the later one, which in turn forces us to reconsider its precursor.

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

How do poems work?  Who, and what, are they for?  This course will introduce you to the pleasures of poetry in English, seeking to develop the tools and vocabulary in order to better appreciate the full range of what verse can do.  In the first two-thirds, we will read key poets from the Renaissance to Modernism, including Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams.  In the last third, we will turn to contemporary American poetry and song in order to consider how they intervene in ongoing national conversations about democracy and identity.  The poets and lyricists studied include Mos Def, Bob Dylan,  Rita Dove, Claudia Rankine,  Kendrick Lamar, Richard Blanco and Beyoncé.

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

What do texts and theories about, and the uses of, the languages and cultures of Africans and their descendants in the Diaspora reveal about the making of race- and class-related hierarchies of power throughout the world?  What do these texts and theories require of all of us and how can they be enriched by our own analyses—of us as local community members and as world citizens? How can we improve our future through the study of our past? How can we identify and analyze general global patterns through the study of the local and specific?
And,  most importantly, how can this “Black Matters” subject at MIT be made relevant to the “Black Lives Matter” movement writ large? We will use selected texts and theories to analyze the shaping and reshaping of languages, cultures and identities in Africa and the African Diaspora, especially in the “New World.” Haiti, my native land, will serve as starting point for these big questions that bear on both local and global issues of relevant to us here at MIT—and beyond, of relevance to our future as change makers.  We will use language, linguistics, education, history, religion, literature, etc., to examine how theories and concomitant attitudes about Africans and their descendants in the African Diaspora have shaped, and have been shaped by, global events through struggle, rebellion, critique and innovation. And the struggle continues… YES, BLACK LIVES MATTER

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

This subject will examine a series of classic films by American, European, and Asian 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: The Silent Era (films by such directors as Griffith, Chaplin, Keaton, Murnau); Hollywood Genres (Capra, Fosse, Hawks, Huston, Kelly, Polanski, Welles); International Masters (Renoir, De Sica, Kurosawa, Kar-wai).
All films will be screened in an evening lab slot and will also be available for streaming on demand for registered students. Two lectures and one recitation meeting per week.

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

This class considers romantic comedy in literature spanning over 2000 years of a mostly Western tradition.  We will look at examples of Greek, Roman, and Shakespearean drama and the bawdy stories of Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Rabelais; investigate love in the social satire of Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde;  and try to understand the uneasy relationship between farce and romance, violence and redemptive humor, satire and festivity in comic art. We will focus on certain continuities: the body as object and source of rebellious pleasure; transgression against social norms corrected and reordered through laughter; verbal play and wit; identity and mistaken identity; political protest and social reform. As the class develops, we will also note the ways writers appropriate and reshape comic plots and structures from the past for new uses. Discussion will frequently draw on examples of popular and contemporary forms of comic expression.

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

In Middlemarch, the novelist known as George Eliot (but in real life named Mary Ann Evans) created one of great masterpieces in the history of fiction.  Many people think it the greatest novel in the English language and Eliot one of literature’s greatest stylists.  Her capacity for psychological, ethical, and social analysis is unrivaled.  Her humor is subtle, delightful, and humane.
“It is the habit of my imagination,” Eliot wrote, “to strive after as full a vision of the medium in which a character moves as of the character itself.”  Middlemarch immerses us in the medium of a society confronting profound changes and introduces us to memorable characters attempting to navigate, embrace, or resist those changes, in ways that are both specific to 19th-century Britain and still relevant today.  What do you do when your ambition exceeds the scope of your life possibilities?  How should you choose a mate?  How much compromise is acceptable in pursuit of your goals?  How do societies treat outsiders or misfits who challenge the status quo?  These are just a few of the abiding questions Eliot explores in Middlemarch.
Middlemarch is long – the Victorians liked novels that way – but we will take plenty of time to get to know it.  Meeting once a week for 90 minutes per session, the class will run for the entire semester, allowing 13 weeks for about 900 pages.  We’ll be able to dwell for a while with a masterwork eminently worth dwelling with.

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

While my title harks back to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, it refers more directly to the Aldous Huxley novel with which we shall begin our exploration of utopic and dystopic fantasies that imaginatively respond to the promises and perils of scientific ‘progress.’  Alongside fiction from the Renaissance to the twentieth century – including such authors as Bacon, Cavendish, Brecht, and H G Wells – we will delve into the work of writers such as Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, who have thought deeply about the implications of scientific and technological rationality.

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H

Shakespeare on Film and Media  raises many questions for literary and media studies about adaptation and authorship; the status of “classic” texts and their variant forms;  the role of Shakespeare in popular culture; the transition from manuscript, book, and stage to the modern medium of film and its recent digitally enhanced forms; and the implications of global production and distribution of Shakespeare on film in the digital age.
The viewing list varies from term to term. This term we will emphasize international films and performance videos from Russia (Kozintsev’s Hamlet and King Lear) Japan (Ryutopia Company’s Hamlet; Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood) Taiwan (Wu-Hsing-kuo’s Lear is Here),  Brazil (Nos de Morro Midsummer Night’s Dream) and India (Bhardwaj’s Maqbool) along with  Polanski’s Macbeth,  Zeffirelli’s and Baz Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet,  Henry V  (Olivier and Branagh) Julie Taymor’s Titus,  and Almereyda’s Hamlet.

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

Tradition and innovation in a representative sampling of novels and shorter fiction by the great English and European modernists – Conrad,  Woolf, Joyce, Kafka, and others. Recurring topics will include the role of the artist in the modern period, the representation of sexual and psychological experience, shifting attitudes toward gender roles and social class, and the aggressively experimental character of so many modern texts. Early classes will link our writers with the great impressionist and modernist painters.

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-A

The course consists of three units:
NARRATIVE THEORY.  After an introductory look at multi-sequential novels and electronic literature, we study narratology (narrative theory) to gain a better understanding of the form and function of narratives and the elements and aspects of interactive narrative.
FORKING PATHS.  We study non-linear print pieces of different sorts – not only the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure series but other juvenile fiction books of similarly unusual structure; parodies of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books; literary works by Saporta, Queneau, Mathews, Pavić, Coover, and others; and comics by Jason Shiga and others.  Students write their own creative multisequential print piece.
ELECTRONIC LITERATURE. We focus on digital work that has narrative as an important component. Often the “user” or “reader” is the one who gets to produce the narratives by interacting.  A narrative electronic literature work can be a structured document that the interactor can traverse in many ways or a more complex computer program that simulates a world, accepts English input, and perhaps does other interesting things. This includes many computer and video games, including interactive fiction, along with classic and more recent hypertext fictions, visual novels, and many other examples of creative computing.  The main project for the term is to create a work of electronic literature of some sort, which can be done through programming or by structuring language as hypertext.

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, Gabriela Mistral, Roberto Bolaño, Mayra Febres-Santos, 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

What’s a great play, or even a good one?  And for what or whom is it good—the actor, the audience, the world?  Does the production make it good, or is the text of the play enough?  In this seminar, we will study plays that made a difference in the twentieth century, when American drama really began to define itself and to have an influence on world drama.  We’ll consider the plays’ historical context, including influential productions, as well as editorial and publication decisions.  Participants will have the chance to see both filmed and live productions, and to become an expert on a playwright of their choice.

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

Iron chefs & home cooks; molecular gastronomy & farm-to-table dining; grain-based & protein-based diets: a time traveler from the future would learn a lot about us from our cookbooks, blogs, and Food Network. When we visit the past through cookbooks, we find strange and quirky recipes, but we also learn about the worlds that produced them: about foodstuffs & technology; about religious beliefs and nutritional theories; about who wrote, read, and cooked; and about the gender dynamics of culinary writing.

Prereq: Permission of instructor
Units arranged; Can be repeated for credit

Begins April 3

Introduces rudiments of ancient Greek—the language of Plato, Sophocles, Thucydides, 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 by petition (after completion of both) to count as a single HASS Elective.