Subjects Taught by Semester

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

Masterpieces of European literature read with an emphasis on understanding the roots of an expansive classical tradition stemming from ancient Greece and Rome. Core texts will be Vergil’s Aeneid, the Homeric Odyssey, and Dante’s Inferno. We meet heroes and monsters, gods and demons, and read deeply into three of the foundational texts of Western literature. We ask what it means to be “a classic” and explore the ways in which literary authority comes into being in the context of history and society.

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

An introduction to poetry in English, chiefly by British and American poets. We will explore Renaissance, eighteenth-century, Romantic, and Modernist poetry in particular detail. Though the organization of the subject is chronological, our focus will be less on names and dates than on cultivating skills in careful reading and effective writing. Poets to be read may include Shakespeare, Sidney, Wordsworth, Keats, Dickinson, Frost, Eliot, and Elizabeth Bishop.

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

In this course, we’ll encounter dramatic texts from the Greeks to the present, exploring their cultural and period differences, as well as the “theatricality” of an art form experienced in three dimensions and in real time. Class members will discuss readings, write papers, review dramatic performances and have the option to perform scenes themselves. In addition to modern and contemporary plays, readings will range from Ancient Greece to Medieval England, Golden Age Spain and Classical Japan.

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 course is an introductory survey of classic films. Emphasis falls equally on cultural and on artistic matters: on films as anthropological and historical artifacts that articulate the values and beliefs of particular societies and on films as works of art. The course aims to sharpen students’ analytic skills, to give them a sense of the history and cultural significance of movies, and to improve their writing. The course is divided into three segments: the silent era (films by Griffith, Chaplin, Keaton and Murnau); Hollywood genres and beyond (Donen and Kelly, Hitchcock, Ford, Welles, Fosse, Altman, Malick); international masters (Renoir, DeSica, Kurosawa, Wong Kar-wai).

Writing requirements: The course satisfies the criteria for communication intensive subjects in the humanities, arts, and social sciences. Students are required to write a short (1-2 page) exercise in close reading of a scene or scenes from the silent shorts shown in the first weeks and two essays, totaling a minimum of 20 double-spaced typed pages, devoted to films studied during the term.

Exams: Three open-book take-home exams – the rough equivalent of problem sets – during the semester and a three-hour final during the exam period.

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

Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama as well as eleven Tony Awards, Lin Manuel-Miranda’s Hamilton: An American Musical (2015) is a critical and commercial smash hit. Justly praised for its innovative rap battles and nontraditional casting, this musical also builds in brilliant ways on the work of past creators of musical theater whose work has too often been undervalued and overlooked. To enrich our appreciation of Manuel-Miranda’s work, we will begin by studying forms of drama that routinely go untaught, including minstrelsy, burlesque, vaudeville, and the classic American book musical. In the process, we will celebrate the groundbreaking yet often forgotten (or appropriated) achievements of artists of color, including Master Juba, the Black Swan, Little Egypt, Buck and Bubbles, Baby Esther, and many others. By the time we get to Hamilton, our deep understanding of how popular songs and musicals are structured will enable us to analyze Manuel-Miranda’s debts to past artists as well as to appreciate his scintillating originality.

Prereq: none
3-3-6 HASS-H/SS

Has the experience of illness changed over time and across borders? We will explore this question through narratives from the perspective of patients and physicians. This inquiry is particularly relevant at this moment when shifting medical paradigms are at the heart of debates that have global impact and deep personal consequences. Materials will include essays, fiction, poetry, memoir, blogs, film and television, spanning from antiquity to the present day. In addition, there will be guest lecture by authors, journalists and scholars in the field. Each student will be assigned a mentor from the greater Boston medical community with whom they will discuss the role of storytelling in that physician’s career.

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

“Well behaved women seldom make history.” Nor do they often make it into the pages of novels. This semester we’ll read about scheming women, defiant women, abandoned women, seduced women, dangerous women—but rarely about well behaved women. 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? Most of all, why do we like them so much? Authors might include: Daniel Defoe, Frances Burney, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Townsend Warner.

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

In this course we will read literature and view films that register the global reverberations of shock and trauma. We will travel from the early twentieth-century to the present day, studying texts that variously engage World War I, World War II, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, 9/11 and the War on Terror, and the legacies of colonialism and slavery. We will discuss historical memory and the intergenerational transmission of trauma; the role of modern technologies including poison gas and drone warfare; and, the blurring of lines between front-lines/home front, victim/perpetrator, civilian/combatant, local/global. Our focus will be on the formal and aesthetic techniques that an earlier generation of modernist writers developed to confront the staggering scale and abstractions of war, as well as the way that a new generation of modernists are continuing this project today. Primary texts and films will include Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, China Miéville’s Three Moments of an Explosion, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Teju Cole’s Open City, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

Prereq: Permission of instructor
3-0-9 HASS-H; Can be repeated for credit

What role do writers play in a social movement? How does literature today respond to systemic racism and rampant xenophobia; travel bans and deportation sweeps; police brutality and mass incarceration? Can a poem, a novel, or an essay make a difference? This course will tackle these questions by pairing contemporary literature, music, film, and television with works by earlier writers who used literature to speak out, fight back, and bear witness.

The pairings we will analyze and discuss include:

James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates
Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison
Frederick Douglass and Colson Whitehead
Gloria Anzaldúa and Valeria Luiselli
José Martí and Lin Manuel-Miranda
Nina Simone and Solange Knowles
Marvin Gaye and D’Angelo
W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk and Jordan Peele’s Get Out
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Sam Esmail’s Mr. Robot

Prereq: none
2-0-4

Begin to read ancient Greek literature in the original language. Our text this semester is Lucian’s True Story, considered one of the first examples of science fiction in the Western tradition. This course provides a bridge for students with one semester or more of formal Greek training (Greek 1/2, high school Greek, or equivalent) between the study of Greek grammar and vocabulary and the reading of Greek authors. May be repeated for credit if the content differs.

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.

ends March 20

Prereq: none
2-0-4 HASS-H

Begin to read Latin literature in the original language. Our text this semester is Pliny the Younger’s Letters, some of the most immediate and intimate documents of Roman life under Emperor Trajan. This course provides 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. May be repeated for credit.

begins April 1

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

Studies important 20th- and 21st-century texts and films from both Spain and Latin America. Readings include short stories, theater, the novel, and poetry, as well as some non-fiction. Students acquire skills necessary for a serious examination of literacy and cultural issues in the Spanish-speaking world. Conducted entirely in Spanish. Emphasis on active participation of students in class discussion.

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

“Call me Ishmael,” begins Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851). “It’s not my fault,” starts off Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child (2015), a novel that she dedicates simply “For You.” These conversational openings pick up a long-running national dialogue about who Americans are, what they have experienced, and what it cost. Toni Morrison and Herman Melville bring much to the national conversation and are also deeply concerned with the saying itself: with voices and issues, with who gets into the discussion and who is kept out. In this seminar, we will pair their works at critical junctures, thinking about talk and silencing in Morrison’s God Help the Child and Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno”; imagined communities in Morrison’s Beloved and Melville’s Moby-Dick; violence, migration, and identity in Morrison’s Paradise and Melville’s Israel Potter; and history, authority, and authorship in Melville’s Billy Budd and Morrison’s A Mercy. Students will deliver in-class reports on secondary and critical readings, submit periodic response papers, and write essays based on research and reflection.

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

Late in his middle age, unmarried and childless, Walt Whitman was dismayed to hear that rumors were circulating about his sexuality. In response, he encouraged his friends to spread a counter-rumor: the reason he wasn’t interested in women was that he was still grieving for a lost love, from decades earlier. She was mulatto; they met in New Orleans, where during the 1840s he lived for six months; during that time they had had six children together [sic] before they had had, tragically, to separate. He’d never returned to New Orleans….
In this seminar we won’t spend a lot of time discussing the plausibility of this story of Whiman’s children. The irony is, though, that he did have a lot of progency: writers and theorists and artists who define themselves as overtly
in the “line of Whitman” [sometimes eagerly claiming continuity, sometimes consciously acting out Oedipal resistance]. We’ll read through the terms of Whitman’s long career, stage by stage [his idealism and anxiety before the Civil War, his work as a nurse during the War, his conflicted love poems, his celebration oflate-19th-century American expansionism and industrialization] At each stage we’ll also read work by writers, across several continents and centuries, who admired [or resisted] his model:
–novelists including D H Lawrence and Thomas Mann
–poets [Ezra Pound, W C Williams, Hilda Doolittle, Marianne Moore, Allen Ginsberg] –gender-theorists and provocateurs [Oscar Wilde] –post-colonialist writers and theorists of Negritude [Aimee Cesaire] –epic/lyric writers [Pablo Neruda, J L Borges] –contemporary writers of collective narratives [Vladimir Mayakovsky, Grace Paley]

We’ll also have a visit by a dramatist who will present her play on Whitman [and on the problems of representing him] and a screening of a new film on Emily Dickinson, which focuses on the dynamic of reputation-formation after a writer’s death [It’s more interesting– and funnier– than it sounds in paraphrase].

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

The history of land is a history of violence: stolen land, colonised land, the extraction of wealth from land via deforestation and mining, and land divided by segregation, occupation, and apartheid. This class will look at various ways in which these violent struggles play out and how they are resisted by the peoples living on the land who are affected. We will look at films (both narrative and documentary) and writing (novels and theory) from locations including Australia, Native North America, Palestine, South Africa, and the United States

Course readings will explore a wide range of issues including race and urban planning, gentrification, globalisation, indigenous and aboriginal claims to land, land divided by apartheid and occupation, and the ecological devastation caused by global capitalism. We will also look at the work of activists, film makers, and writers who offer counter-visions that challenge (and at times unintentionally reinforce) the status quo of the present.

This is an advanced seminar, the highest level course in the humanities at MIT. The prerequisite is one introductory course in film or media studies and at least one further subject in Literature/CMS. I am willing to waive the prerequisite on a case-by-case basis; however, you should have a strong background in analytical writing in the humanities and understand the workload and expectations for the course.