Subjects Taught by Semester

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

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, geographical, and historical boundaries, and reckons with a dangerous world. Readings will consider structuring themes of the literary voyage and their consequences: in, 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 (M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West), and ambiguous return (Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, and Mia Heavener’s Under Nushagak Bluff). No passports required.

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

An introduction to poetry in English, chiefly British and American, from Shakespeare through Terrance Hayes. Organized by poetic forms (sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, blank verse, free verse, and rap, this course will consider each form from some of its earliest examples in English to contemporary modifications in form and content.  Doing so, we will consider how poets, over the centuries, have carried on wide-ranging conversations—aesthetic, historical, political– through the rhythms, images, and ideas of poetry. Emphasis in the course will be on cultivating your pleasure in the richness of poetry and learning how to articulate that pleasure with precision in essays and oral presentations.

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

This course surveys the texts and contexts that have shaped and continue to shape North American literature. From Walt Whitman’s proud assertion of his notion of an American selfhood in “Song of Myself” (1855) to Tommy Orange’s engaging method of writing contemporary Native Americans into a clear and similarly assertive focus in There There (2018), we will explore multiple versions of American identity as they have developed through time, across different regions both inside and outside the U.S., and through representation in the major literary genres of prose narrative, poetry, and drama. Readings include, but are not limited to the following authors: Henry James, Elizabeth Bishop, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Min Jin Lee, Toni Morrison.

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

Cinema was arguably the first form of global culture, and there can be no doubt that the many screen fictions it has spawned dominate our contemporary cultural landscape. This course will teach you to develop sophisticated approaches to understanding screen fiction through the study of exemplary movies, assigned readings, lectures, and discussions. In the first half of the semester, you will learn to analyze screen narratives, concentrating on specific elements of film language and visual grammar, such as editing and cinematography.

The second half of the class will focus on more theoretical issues, such as authorship, genre, and the nature of interpretation. By the end of the course, you will be better equipped to think about how films create meaning and circulate values—that is, how they entertain us and how they shape our socio-political environments and personal identities, both within US culture and globally.

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

The dangerous woman has been a fixture in literature from Eve and Helen of Troy to the ruthless protagonists of modern film and television. Who is she? What makes her dangerous? How should we, as readers and viewers, respond to her? How do depictions of her change over time and across geographic, cultural, and gender borders? This class will introduce European and Latin American fiction from the eighteenth century to the present day through a series of dangerous women, some of whom incited controversy from the second they first appeared in print. Some of the works we will explore include Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, and Isabelle Allende’s The House of the Spirits, as well as selections of short fiction and film. Class projects will include creative as well as critical writing, and the opportunity to rework and adapt class texts.

Prereq: none
3-0-9

What have books been, and what might they be? How can actually making books “edit” our expectations about them? In this course, we undertake three main activities. First, we study the history of the book in Europe and the world, from Gutenberg (ca. 1450) to the Industrial Revolution. Second, we examine in detail books, prints, and related artifacts from the MIT Libraries and MIT Museum collections. Third, working in the Beaver Press print shop on the eighth floor of Barker Library, we will use a movable-type printing press built by MIT students for a series of printing exercises, culminating in an 8-page pamphlet designed and printed entirely by hand. (We also plan to make paper!) Through these activities, we will develop a holistic view of print: its stakes, its requirements, its valances, and its possible iterations. Along the way, we consider parallels between the Early Modern textual world and today’s rapidly changing media landscape. How might “affordances” of particular media contribute to shaping texts themselves? And how might placing new media in historical context help us understand the book’s future potential?

Assignments include essays and online projects. Students participate in the design and construction of a hand-set printing press. Limited to 12.

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

(Begins March 30th) The “small wonders” of this class are short poems, songs, sonnets, odes, and others from a period famed for excellence in these short literary forms. The poetry produced in England in the years 1789-1820 revolutionized the themes and diction of poetry and substantially rethought the nature of poetic thinking. This subject will read ample selections of lyric writing from the major poets of English Romanticism, and will situate this poetry in relation to what William Wordsworth described as “the great national events” of his moment (the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, economic modernization, urbanization and industrialization, the early feminist and abolitionist movements, etc.). Our readings will attend more particularly to the invention of a formal literary language responsive to these contexts. Authors will include William Blake, Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, John Keats, Lord Byron. The student who takes this subject can expect to gain an intimate familiarity with some of the most exhilarating, challenging, and beautiful short poems in the language.

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

This course takes a deep look at a big subject. We ask where Fairy Tales come from, surveying the work of the famous Brothers Grimm, before moving on to
historic fairy belief in traditional Celtic societies, centering on the folkloristic work of Robert Kirk in late seventeenth-century Scotland, and his links with the Royal Society. We look at the structure of Fairy Tales, and how they are conditioned by oral transmission, and inherited story-telling techniques. We ask what Fairy Tales mean, considering a range of Freudian and Jungian interpretations, and the claims made for them as a key psychological tool.

There follow two case studies of the abuse of Fairy Tales, firstly by the Nazis in 1930s Germany for the purposes of political indoctrination, and, secondly, by Walt Disney in the famous series of animated movies starting with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. We consider the filmic techniques involved, and the charges of sexism and political conservatism frequently laid at Disney’s door. We end with a close study of modern literary written Fairy Tales from writers including Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Dickens, L. Frank Baum, Margaret Atwood, and Angela Carter.

The goal of the class is to teach students how to approach cultural history in a broadbased multi-disciplinary manner, using a blend of folklore, history, psychology and film and textual studies. The student will gain a detailed appreciation of the links between oral tradition and print, and the means by which culture is transmitted down the centuries via a wide range of media.

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H

Nowadays, when we think about the interaction between human beings and nature, we tend to focus on environmental damage: deforestation, pollution, climate change and the catastrophes to which it has contributed. In this course, however, we will read Anglo-American literature that represents the interaction between humans and the natural world as joyous, sublime, revelatory, and mutually sustaining. We will traverse the Lake District with William Wordsworth, Walden Pond with Henry David Thoreau, and the Grand Canyon with Lauret Savoy. We will listen to Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes “sing America,” and read breathtakingly beautiful fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature about plants and animals, hiking and fishing, the earth, the ocean, and the sky. Without denying that human beings have damaged the world we inhabit—and that certain groups have been systematically barred from enjoying equal access to its beauty and bounty—we will focus on the role that pleasure, wonder, and hope might play in helping us to envision new modes of engagement with each other and an ever-changing environment.

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H

(Same subject as WGS.245)  This course will focus on LGBT literature from the late nineteenth century to the present with an emphasis on fiction and poetry. In particular, we will analyze how LGBT identities and their literary representations have changed over time. Our discussion will give special attention to the ways in which race, class, and disability intersect with sexuality and gender. Some of the authors we will read include James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Delany, Tony Kushner, Audre Lorde, Alison Bechdel, and Leslie Feinberg.

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

We will read major poems by the most important poets in English in the twentieth century, from the period post-WW I disillusionment, through WW II internationalism and beyond. Our special focus this term will be on how the concept of “the Image”evolved during this period. The War had undercut beliefs in master-narratives of nationalism and empire, and the language-systems that supported them (religious transcendence, rationalism, and formalism). Retrieving energies from the Symbolist movements of the preceding century and from turnof-the-century technologies of vision, early twentieth-century poets began to rethink how images carry information, and in what ways the visual, visionary, and verbal image can take the place of transcendent beliefs. New theories of linguistics and anthropology helped to advance this interest in the artistic/religious/social image. So did Freud. So did Charlie Chaplin. So did the invention of the snapshot. We will read poems that pay attention both to this disillusionment and to the compensatory joyous attention to the image: to ideas of the poet as language priest, aesthetic experience as displaced religious impulse, to poems as faith, ritual, and cultural form– and to poems as witness of the ordinary, the joyous, the goofy, the strange. Poets whose work we will read include: W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop. Several short papers, class presentations, no final exam. Several visiting poets, slams, readings and performances.

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

What role does literature play in updating our understanding of hope as a concept and as an exercise we can try to emulate, practice and embody in our lives? Has another concept replaced the role that hope is meant to play? Is hope going by another name? What updates on hope have we encountered in novels, poems, or songs in the past few years? What do these new iterations of hope suggest about how stories need to be improved and modernized to make hope relevant for different generations of readers? How does hope speak in a story—what are the contours of its language? What does the future look like through its perspective, and how does it attempt to equip us with tools to wade through, endure, and even enjoy this thing called life? How many different variations of hope can we find toward creating something like the beginnings of a taxonomy of hope? What does hope look like for different kinds of writers? Might a work by Alice Walker, one by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and another by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie fall under a category we’d call epistolary hope, for example? As a practice in/of hope, students will be required to write and revise their arguments about how hope is evolving through our readings.

Prereq: none
2-0-4

(Ends March 18th) Begin to read ancient Greek literature in the original language. The reading selections from Homer’s Odyssey includes the famous episodes of Odysseus’ wanderings, featuring the Cyclops, Circe, the descent to the Underworld, the Sirens, and Scylla & Charybdis. 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

(begins March 18) 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.

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 in the 20th and 21st Centuries? How has Spain envisioned its place within Western Europe? How has Latin America defined itself in relationship to its northern neighbor? What role have revolutions played in shaping the literatures of Spanish-speaking nations? How did the rise of Fascism (Spain) and dictatorships (Latin America) shape literary responses? Myths of national identity, new gender roles and the changing relationships between State and religion will be examined. We will view six films—from Spain, Mexico and Argentina. Some of the authors and filmmakers we will study include the poets: Neruda, Vallejo, Lorca, Figuera, Cernuda, Blas de Otero, Celaya; fiction writers: Borges, Márquez, Puig, Bolaño, Martín Gaite; film directors: Salles, Buñuel, Saura and Almodóvar. The course is project-based with students defining and investigating those issues that are most important to them. The class 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

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

Close study of three substantial novels of the Victorian period (1837-1901) written by successors to Austen’s realist fiction about English life in the provinces. We will read: Miss Marjoribanks by Margaret Oliphant (1866); The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope (1867); and the incomparable Middlemarch by George Eliot* (1871-72), widely considered one of the greatest of all novels. These large works offer richly immersive fictional worlds, so we read only three so as to take our time with them. They feature situations that raise all manner of vital social questions about family, courtship and marriage, women’s ambition and scope for action, pride and honor, interpretation and rationalization, innovation and conservatism, old and new money, authority and power – many of which remain highly  ertinent today. The Victorian period may seem a long time ago, but as these novels show it was a time when society really began to cope with the consequences and  hallenges of becoming modern. (NOTE: you do NOT need to have taken a class on Jane Austen in order to take this one. You are welcome whether you have done so or not.) Work will include frequent short response papers, one or two brief oral reports, and a final creative project or critical essay. *George Eliot was the pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans.

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

In a world where screen sizes are diminishing and speakers—especially headphones—are improving, sound is becoming an increasingly important aspect of contemporary aesthetic experience. Yet film scholars persistently theorize the medium in terms of images and visual spectacles. We say we watch or go see a movie. However, as we all know, we also listen to films! Our class is going to explore cinema as an audiovisual medium, learning about the history of filmmakers’ experiments with relations of sight and sound. We shall look and listen carefully to ways that the mechanical reproduction of sound has been used to create both pleasure and meaning—as speech, music, and noise—by experiencing, among others, films by Jane Campion, Alfred Hitchcock, Derek Jarman, Fritz Lang, Lynne Ramsay, and Jacques Tati. We will also explore philosophical conceptualizations of what makes listening distinctive, reminding ourselves, for instance, that unlike the eye the ear has no lid. In doing so, this class is positioned at the cutting edge of a rapidly growing field within Film Studies interested in sonic aesthetics, as well as within the field of Sound Studies more broadly.

Prereq: Permission of instructor
3-0-9 G

“Medium” (pl. media) here designates the means and technologies by which temporal events are materially fixed and conveyed to aesthetic experience. Linked to waves of successive technological innovations in image-making, “media theory” established itself historically by taking the measure of phantasmagorical lantern shows, stereographic photography, cinema, and television. Makers were deeply involved in the project of theorizing their image-making practices, from Talbot with his “pencil of nature” to Soviet Russian filmmakers’ concepts of estrangement and montage. The extensive literature on medium-specificity received a profound jolt during the epoch of “digital convergence.” Are digital media still capable of theorization, or are we only capable of accounting for the platforms that circulate them? Does the concept of transmedia achieve the theorization of this mediation-by-platform? This seminar will take a deeply historical view of what has been known as media theory, and will engage the tensions that vex this discursive position today. Taught by an art historian and by a film scholar, Media Theory asks an overarching question: how are subjects formed by, and in, durational visual media?

Open to graduate students in any department, and advanced undergraduates (by petition to the instructors).