Subjects Taught by Semester

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

Intensive focus on the reading and writing skills used to analyze literary texts such as poems by Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare or Langston Hughes; short stories by Chekhov, Joyce, or Alice Walker; and a short novel by Melville or Toni Morrison. Designed not only to prepare students for further work in writing and literary and media study, but also to provide increased confidence and pleasure in their reading, writing, and analytical skills. Students write or revise essays weekly.

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 William Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, and Elizabeth Bishop.

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

Debt comes in many forms: those to do with money (student loans, medical bills, credit cards); the debts we have to each other (how we respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, how we consider issues of justice and incarceration, what reparations we owe for the atrocities of slavery and Indigenous genocide); and environmental debts (what rights do we owe to animals, what do we owe the earth in the face of human-created climate catastrophe?).

This class is focused on issues of social justice, and we will learn to recognize and critique capitalist forms of debt within the United States. We will also read a range of novels, poems, and critical/theoretical texts in order to imagine other kinds of indebtedness and togetherness that value worth beyond credit scores and bank balances.

This class is a CI-H subject, which means that it will provide you with a foundation in written and oral communication. CI-H subjects require that you plan, organize, draft, and revise a series of sequenced assignments based on course material. Assessment is based on consistent participation and engagement throughout the semester, rather than being heavily weighted towards a final paper.

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

Interdisciplinary survey of people of African descent that draws on the overlapping approaches of history, literature, anthropology, legal studies, media studies, performance, linguistics, and creative writing. Connects the experiences of African-Americans and of other American minorities, focusing on social, political, and cultural histories, and on linguistic patterns. Includes lectures, discussions, and workshops that involve minimal cost to students.

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

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; first half of term

(Ends April 2) F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), a long-time bestseller, is often read as a quintessential portrayal of the American Dream. Jay Gatsby, a white working-class outsider, adopts the persona of a wealthy aristocrat in Jazz Age New York. Black authors in the last century have engaged with Fitzgerald’s book or its themes, refreshing its impact in intriguing ways. As we will see in this class, the protagonist of Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), like Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, aspires to the world of wealthy socialites; Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992), taking place in the same period as Fitzgerald’s novel, views the Jazz Age within the context of the Great Migration and Jim Crow; and Stephanie Powell Watts’s No One Is Coming to Save Us (2017) situates Gatsby’s story in a declining North Carolina town, where JJ Ferguson, a wealthy Black entrepreneur, builds an impressive mansion. Reading Fitzgerald’s novel in dialogue with African American history and literary culture suggests how The Great Gatsby has grown and changed over the last century.

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

(Begins April 5) Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno, a nineteenth-century story of mutiny at sea, is a duplicitous text. Somewhat in the manner of a detective story, Melville’s narrative raises questions about its design and its designs upon a reader. This class seeks to understand the text’s perils and pleasures by applying digital tools to the reading process. We will explore methods for deepening the reading experience, using a wide range of approaches:

1. Reading and annotating the text in MIT’s Annotation Studio
2. Fluid-text analysis: exploring and collating different versions—magazine and book publication, as well as different editions and formats
3. Comparison with source text, Amasa Delano’s A Narrative of Voyages and Travels, and other literary and historical sources
4. Marginalia: Melville’s manuscript annotations as critical tool
5. Text analysis using Voyant Tools to locate significant patterns
6. Digital research in MIT Libraries databases

Students will read and discuss texts intensively in class; practice using different digital platforms; post questions and responses in a class discussion forum; present an in-class report; and keep a portfolio of materials to submit at the end of the term. No technical expertise required.

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H

Shakespeare wrote in times of plague, protest, and social division: whether kings, queens, or commoners, characters in his plays struggle with personal confinement and their own emotions, highlighting themes of justice, responsibility, and forgiveness. From Nelson Mandela to Toni Morrison and from Kashmir to Kentucky, in every new medium and across the entire world, artists, citizens, fans, and social reformers have taken inspiration from—or taken issue with—Shakespeare’s words. We will study how these plays, re-mediated as books, films, television, images and more, work and circulate now. We will look at scenes and speeches, spin-offs and spoofs, as well as studying especially powerful films from India, Russia, western Europe, the US, and Japan.

This semester, drawing on the affordances of Zoom and other digital technologies, we will also create a unique community of students learning together at a distance while aware of their own confinement—whether in homes, hostels, dorm rooms or New England prisons. We will highlight Shakespeare’s dramas of isolation and social struggle, including Hamlet, King Lear, Richard II, Henry IV, Part 1 and The Tempest, with special attention to the challenges of cross-cultural filmic translation and the importance of collaborative artistic processes across media.

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H

Scifi writer Octavia E. Butler once wrote: “There is nothing new under the sun; but there are new suns.” This ability to up-end what we consider possible and to allow us to imagine differently is the hallmark of science fiction. In this class we will read science fiction that makes use of this radical capacity in order to challenge the oppressive structures of race, gender, colonialism/settler colonialism, and capitalism that we currently live under. By tackling the social injustices of the present, the writers we will read invite us to imagine our futures differently.

This intermediate-level class is focused on issues of social justice. We will read 21st- century science fiction and speculative fiction (including short stories, novels, and films), as well as theoretical and critical texts. Assessment (presentations, short written responses, and a final paper/project) is based on consistent participation and engagement throughout the semester, rather than being heavily weighted towards a final paper.

Prereq: none
3-0-9 H

Beginning with an overview of the narrative arc and major themes of the Hebrew Bible, this course will introduce students to the New Testament as a collection of historical documents from the 1st and 2nd centuries, including biographies, history, letters, and an apocalyptic vision. We will study its historical and cultural context, address issues resulting from the translation of Hebrew into Greek, imagine how the various writings might have been understood by their earliest readers, and draw upon a range of methodologies and the interpretive practices of different traditions. Note: There are no prerequisites for this class; students may register without having taken The Hebrew Bible (21L.456).

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

Explores major modern plays with special attention to performance, sociopolitical and aesthetic contexts, and the role of theater in the contemporary multimedial landscape. Includes analysis of class, gender, and race as modes of performance. Typically features Beckett and Brecht, as well as some of the following playwrights: Chekov, Churchill, Deavere Smith, Ibsen, Fornes, Friel, Kushner, O’Neill, Shaw, Stoppard, Soyinka, Williams, Wilson. May be repeated for credit with permission of instructor if content differs.

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H

Explores the works of classical Russian writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, including stories and novels by Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Bunin, Nabokov, Platonov, and others. Focuses on their approaches to portraying self and society, and on literary responses to fundamental ethical and philosophical questions about justice, freedom, free will, fate, love, loyalty, betrayal, and forgiveness.  Taught in English; students interested in completing some readings and a short writing project in Russian should register for 21G.618.

Prereq: none
2-0-4

(Ends April 2) Introduction to reading ancient Greek literature in the original language. Provides a bridge between the study of Greek grammar and the reading of Greek authors. Improves knowledge of the language through careful examination of literary texts, both prose and poetry. Builds proficiency in reading Greek and develops appreciation for basic features of style and genre. Texts vary from term to term. May be repeated once for credit if content differs. 21L.609 and 21L.610, or two terms of 21L.609, may be combined by petition (after completion of both) to count as a single HASS-H.

Prereq: none
3-0-3; first half of term

(Ends April 2) 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

Deals with the vast changes in Spanish social, political and cultural life that have taken place since the death of Franco (1975). Topics include the transition to democracy, new freedom from censorship, the re-emergence of strong movements for regional autonomy (the Basque region and Catalonia), the new cinema including Almodóvar and Saura, educational reforms instituted by the socialist government, the changes in the role of the Catholic church, the emergence of one of the world’s most progressive gender environment, and new forms of fiction.  Special emphasis on the mass media as a vehicle for expression in Spain. Materials include magazines, newspapers, films, television series, fiction, and essays.  Each student chooses a research project that focuses on an issue of personal interest.  Taught 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 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.” My goal is to ensure that all participants in the class actually gain something useful and fortifying from such an in-depth analysis of her oeuvre. As we allow ourselves the opportunity to meditate on her writings, during the course of the semester, I hope 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 watch interviews of her and read seven or eight of her novels, some of her speeches, her short story “Recitatif,” and critical essays about her work.

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

There are many things one can do with Alfred Hitchcock. The first English-language director to turn his name into a brand, marking each film with a cameo and his famous silhouette, Hitchcock insisted on the recognition of the director as auteur or author. At the same time, he was a notoriously untrustworthy author who loved to taunt the public with contradictory statements about himself and his films—(one of his most famous adages was “torture the audience”). He made immensely popular films in the 1950s and 1960s, which brought him fame and box office success, but he was also known for a small-budget, quirky television series; his films are taught in every introductory film course in the world as examples of artistic virtuosity in the medium, but he also made horror films and screwball comedies. His films are examples of cruel, methodical directorial control, but they are also often very funny; they weave through meditations on compulsion, obsession, aggression, paranoia, guilt, and desire, but they are also durably entertaining. One might read the director’s films as allegories in relation to politics, nationalism, ethics, and the social versus the individual, or turn him into a critic of the ideology of marriage and heterosexuality. In this seminar, we will do all of these things with Alfred Hitchcock and more, examining a broad range of paradoxical films from this most complex director. We will closely study over 15 of Hitchcock’s films, from his early silent pictures of the 1920s to his studio productions of the 1960s to his dark, violent later work. Readings from film theory will help us understand Hitchcock through psychoanalytic, feminist and formalist lenses, and will present major concepts analytically useful for many of his works (suspense, guilt, disguise, desire, the wrong man, the MacGuffin, the blonde, and the blot or stain). At least one previous course in film analysis is required. Required work will involve a mix of theoretical readings and film screenings (on plex), asynchronous listening and writing, and one weekly synchronous meeting. Scholarly output will include a long essay engaging theory and films, and a portfolio mixed-media project.