Subjects Taught by Semester

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-HW
Topics: Improves Close Reading, Improves Oral Communication, Is Writing-Intensive, Studies Adaptations or Translations, Thinks about Popular Culture, Thinks about Race or Class, Thinks about Science, Technology, Environment, Works with Visual Materials/Film/Media

This course will look at literature centered on monstrous figures to think about two things. The first: how do monsters (like devilish magicians, mad scientists, and any number of nameless creatures) show or de-monstrate the fears, anxieties, and problems of specific cultural moments throughout history? What are the techniques authors use to fashion their monstrous characters, and what are their implications? The second: what are we to make of the fact that, while monsters are often objects of terror, they are also frequently sympathetic figures, vibrant fictional characters whose complexities seem to protest the fear they are (supposedly) meant to inspire?

Indeed, many of the monsters we will cover are, to some readers, the heroes of their stories.

By reading literature in genres ranging from 16th century English drama to the 19th century Gothic novel to contemporary American horror fiction, this course will teach you to understand and write about—through close reading, historical and contextual research, and comparative analysis of texts—literature’s rich, ongoing, and ambivalent tradition of making monsters.

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-H
Topics: Improves Close Reading, Improves Oral Communication, Works with Archives

How do you read a poem?  Many people find poetry “difficult” – sometimes pleasurably and sometimes less so. But within that category of the difficult resides much that is of use and of value to us as readers and human beings.  Among the goals of the class, we will be developing and practicing some of the skills, habits, and knowledge to approach poetic texts – difficult or otherwise – so that you can judge for yourselves what they mean for you.  We’ll take a close look at the nature of evidence that can be used for thinking and talking about poetry:  the formal properties of poetic language as well the use of context. We’ll read a wide variety of poetry from 1900 through the present, with some glances further back, and we will explore a variety of tools and approaches, from the old (memorization, listening, and reading out loud) to the new (digitally enabled visualization and annotation).  Most of our reading will be in modern English, so that we can focus on how poets work with its particular properties and affordances, but any knowledge of other languages can be a valuable resource to contribute to our discussion. The last two weeks of the semester will focus on readings chosen and presented by the class.

Prereq: none
3-3-6 HASS-A, CI-H
Topics: Improves Close Reading, Improves Oral Communication, Includes Critical Theory, Includes Hands-on Projects or Making, Is Writing-Intensive, Thinks about Gender or Sexuality, Thinks about Popular Culture, Thinks about Race or Class, Works with Archives, Works with Visual Materials/Film/Media

Concentrates on close analysis and criticism of a wide range of films, including works from the early silent period, documentary and avant-garde films, European art cinema, and contemporary Hollywood fare. Through comparative reading films from different eras and countries, students develop the skills to turn their in-depth analyses into interpretations and explore theoretical issues related to spectatorship. Syllabus varies from term to term, but usually includes such directors as Coppola, Eisenstein, Fellini, Godard, Griffith, Hawks, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Kurosawa, Tarantino, Welles, Wiseman, and Zhang

Prereq: 21L.011 or permission of instructor
3-0-9 HASS-H; Can be repeated for credit
Topics: Improves Close Reading, Includes Critical Theory, Studies Adaptations or Translations, Thinks about Gender or Sexuality, Thinks about Popular Culture, Thinks about Race or Class, Thinks about Science, Technology, Environment, Works with Visual Materials/Film/Media

This seminar explores the films of the American director Stanley Kubrick. Though he made only 13 films, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential directors in film history. The course will closely study films from across his career, and spanning genres including noir, the war film, satire, science fiction, and horror. Our focus will be close analysis of Kubrick’s unique formal language—his use of color, staging, editing, use of space(s), choreographed camerawork, and his extraordinary manipulations of sound and music. We will also analyze his use of satire, parody, and irony; his stylistic deployment of photography, theatricality, and reflexivity; and his complex relationship to war, violence, technology, gender, and sexuality.

Prereq: One subject in Literature or Comparative Media Studies
3-3-6 HASS-H; Can be repeated for credit
Topics: Improves Close Reading, Includes Critical Theory, Thinks about Gender or Sexuality, Thinks about Popular Culture, Thinks about Race or Class, Thinks about Science, Technology, Environment, Works with Visual Materials/Film/Media

Famously, the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi recounts that one day he fell asleep and dreamed he was a butterfly. When he awoke, he was no longer certain whether he was a man who dreamed he was a butterfly – or a butterfly who dreamed he was a man. In this course, we will walk this double line of doubt and belief, asking how literature and film can be used to translate and interpret these moments of unconscious consciousness. Dreams could prophesy, bearing witness to divine intent, as in Genesis and Homer’s epics. Medieval visionary dream poems opened up experimental spaces, where visions of social, political, or personal change might come to fruition. Then, too, psychological interpretations of dreams – driven by Freudian criticism, or realized metaphorically on the screen, as in Nightmare on Elm Street or The Science of Sleep – offered a way to explore one’s own unrealized desires. We will consider stories by E.T.A Hoffmann, H.P. Lovecraft, Mary Shelley, and Franz Kafka; novels such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca; Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream; and contemporary works such as Yasutaka Tsutsui’s Paprika and Karen Thompson Walker’s The Dreamers. Threaded throughout, we will explore such films as 8 ½, Spellbound, Mulholland Drive, and Brazil.

Prereq: none
3-0-9 H
Topics: Improves Close Reading, Studies Adaptations or Translations, Thinks about Gender or Sexuality, Thinks about Social Justice Issues

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-H
Topics: Improves Close Reading, Improves Oral Communication, Includes Critical Theory, Thinks about Gender or Sexuality, Thinks about Popular Culture, Thinks about Race or Class, Thinks about Social Justice Issues

A long tradition of thought endows poetry – derived from the Greek word poiesis, meaning “to make” – with the privilege not just to reflect the social world, but to shape it after its own beautiful image. By this understanding, poetry is naturally suited to utopian imaginings. But in a good deal of modern English-language poetry, poets’ utopian aspirations confront the intractable matter of the world that they would transform or recreate. In the midst of ruins, their poetry explores and seeks to extend the limits of its efficacy to make the world new. We will begin with some poetry of the previous century that responds to contemporary revolutions in America, France, and Haiti. Starting from the modern utopian experiments of the Romantic era, we will then read mainly 20th-century poetry, both utopian and dystopian, by poets including W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Wallace Stevens, Allen Ginsberg, Diane di Prima, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, as well as the work of some contemporaries.

Prereq: none
3-0-3; first half of term
Topics: Improves Close Reading

(Ends 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: Two subjects in Literature
3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-M; Can be repeated for credit
Topics: Improves Close Reading, Improves Oral Communication, Includes Hands-on Projects or Making, Is Writing-Intensive, Thinks about Race or Class, Works with Visual Materials/Film/Media

From ancient Troy, Greece, Rome, and Egypt to medieval England and France, the heroes, lovers, and villains of Shakespeare’s historical plays range widely across Europe and the Mediterranean—while speaking to the politics and passions of his present. We will work backwards and forwards in time from those stories, putting them in dialogue with the perspectives of modern media artists and literary and historical scholars alike, to map the playwright’s imaginative journeys as well as our own. From Troilus and Cressida to Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar to Richard II, we will compare historical upheavals and their dramatic representation, uncovering the societal and theatrical contexts that still compel artists across the globe to stage, rewrite and film them. As well as learning about different disciplinary and theoretical approaches to them, we will analyze drama as performance—a distinctive art form within an ever-changing media landscape.  We will also celebrate the wit and outrageousness of plays such as Henry V, Pericles, and Titus Andronicus, learning from seminar participants as well as guest experts about adaptations and spinoffs, heroic myths and tragic destruction—so students in Theater Arts, Ancient and Medieval Studies, CMS/W, History and, of course, Literature will all be welcome!

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
Topics: Improves Close Reading, Includes Critical Theory, Includes Hands-on Projects or Making, Is Writing-Intensive, Teaches Digital Methods and Tools, Thinks about Gender or Sexuality, Thinks about Popular Culture, Thinks about Race or Class, Thinks about Science, Technology, Environment, Thinks about Social Justice Issues, Works with Archives

Currently, the term “found footage” is perhaps most commonly understood as a sub-genre of the horror film – one that relies on supposedly “true” lost-and-found footage of hauntings, possessions, and other monstrosities to structure their nightmarish narratives (The Blair Witch Project; Paranormal Activity; Unfriended). By playing with audience expectations of authenticity and illusion, found footage horror encourages us to believe that the recovered and reassembled documentary, news, and/or home video footage we are seeing is “real” – making it all the more terrifying. While this seminar is indeed interested in examining the found footage horror genre formally and historically, it also uses it as a jumping off point to explore “found footage” for all its other linked and divergent possibilities. Missing, incomplete, damaged, destroyed, salvaged, remixed, recycled, and re-contextualized film and video structure and inform our moving image world; it is in these gaps, bits, pieces, collages, archives, and ephemera that this seminar takes interest. Over the course of the semester, this class will engage with the aesthetic, ideological, political, and historical implications of the following “lost and found footage”: documentaries and newsreels; early silent and Hollywood cinema; experimental and avant-garde films that make use of found footage; unreleased films; home movies; industrial and educational films; fictional found footage and “mockumentary;” underground and censored footage; and surveillance, webcam, and body-cam footage. In doing so, this seminar will address issues of film theory; cinematic heritage and preservation; film circulation and curation; physical and digital archives; re-appropriation; ownership and privacy; and of course realism and authenticity.