An introduction to poetry in English. We will explore poems written during several periods and in several genres (nature-poems, narratives, the epic, sonnets, odes, experimental forms).

Focus will be less on names and dates than on tactics of analytic reading. Poets whose work we’ll read include William Shakespeare, John Milton, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, June Jordan, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Li-young Lee, Marilyn Chin, and others. Special course-related events (readings, lectures, film screenings) will take place on selected evenings throughout the term. Regular classroom hours will be reduced in the weeks for which a special event is scheduled. [Pre-1900]

In her autobiographical play, To Be Young Gifted and Black (1969), the playwright Lorraine Hansberry wrote: “I think that virtually every human being is dramatically interesting.” In our own lives—through our own verbal and body language—we alternate between deprecating and eagerly embracing what it means to be dramatic: “Oh gosh, he is so dramatic,” we accuse! “Yes, honey! I’m absolutely a drama queen,” we might hear someone proudly profess. “Dee-rahmuh!” we drawl to diagnose a scandalous story. Drama is everywhere around us asserting itself: provoking us, amusing us, challenging us, prompting us, inspiring us, catching the conscience of Kings even—effectively acting on us in some way or another. By reading plays and watching video recordings of some of them, we will attempt to understand what drama does best and uniquely as a literary genre. Toward the end of the semester, we will also consider the various forms drama can take. Where, for example, do we situate a TikTok video, a historical reenactment, a staged protest, a walk down the runway of an underground ballroom, or a flash mob in an Introduction to Drama course? Our encounters may include, but are not limited to, plays by Samuel Beckett, Quiara Alegria Hudes, Lorraine Hansberry, August Wilson, David Henry Hwang, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Shakespeare.

William Shakespeare didn’t go to college. If he could time-travel like Dr. Who, he would be stunned to find his words on a university syllabus. But he would not be surprised at the way we will be using those words in this class, because the study of rhetoric was essential to all education in his day. We too will focus on communication using words, with Shakespeare as a capacious model and inspiration for dialogue, self-presentation, and writing. By writing ‘with’ Shakespeare—critically, creatively, in groups, and in a variety of media—you will have ample opportunity to explore the elements and occasions that shape effective, meaningful communication. We will consider how his plays have in turn been reinterpreted across the globe: in addition to reciting famous speeches, we will analyze both text and film versions of the comedy Much Ado About Nothing and the tragedy Othello, and you will explore an online MITx module as preparation to perform dramatic scenes from what is now a ‘problem play,’ The Merchant of Venice. Finally, we will look at how Shakespeare revises his stories and style in the late ‘romance’ A Winter’s Tale. In the process, you will get to ‘play’ a Shakespeare scholar, and debate the reasons for the playwright’s enduring power. Nevertheless, our aim is less to appreciate his works as an end in themselves than to draw on his remarkable drama (including its vocabulary, variety, verve, and verbal command) in order to help you improve your own writing, speaking, analytic thinking, use of resources, and understanding of media today. [Pre-1900]

Is this the only possible world? Or are there others free of white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and ecological devastation? What might it mean not just to imagine these possibilities but to listen for other worlds that already exist alongside our own? In this course, we will examine how Afrofuturism, magical realism, and other forms of the fantastic in North and Latin America not only envision alternatives to the current order but also identify existing ways of being otherwise in the world. In addition to analyzing texts and films, we will incorporate theoretical insights from black studies, latinx studies, queer studies, and feminism into our discussions. Some of the authors we will read include Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin, Samuel Delany, Gabriel García Márquez, José María Arguedas, and Alejo Carpentier; films we will watch include Candyman, Nope, The Devil’s Knot, and Embrace of the Serpent; and pop culture narratives we will study include Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda, Barry Jenkins’ The Underground Railroad, Disney’s Encanto and Beyoncé’s Black is King.

An introduction to reading and writing creative nonfiction. We will explore essays and memoirs written in different periods and cultural traditions. We will focus on how writers use language to represent ordinary experience in reflective and artistic ways. Writers whose work we’ll read include Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, James Baldwin, and Henry David Thoreau, among many others. Students will regularly give and receive feedback in writing workshops.

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.

This class introduces students to major international writers who explore the intersections of the environment and pressing social issues related to gender and sexuality. Writers to be considered include Han Kang, Sayaka Murata, Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee, and Ruth Ozeki, among others.

Time seems accelerated and old ways of life recede ever more swiftly from view. New labor-saving technologies compel one to wonder what role human beings will have in the future, and even to question what it means to be human at all. Novel economic theories coexist alongside, and in some cases are produced to justify, widening economic inequality. As citizens gather in the streets to protest, the government works to suppress dissent in the press and in public.

The account above could be taken to describe social conditions in the contemporary United States. It also describes conditions that prevailed in Great Britain in a period almost 250 years ago, around the turn of the 19th century. That period of upheaval, and the writers who responded to this rapidly modernizing world, known today as “Romantics,” are the focus of this class. Romantic authors wrote with boldness of imaginative conception and a spirit of formal experimentation meant to confront and to meet on its own ground the realities of contemporary life. We’ll read poems and other texts, encountering elegy, activism, humor, and anger, in authors including William Blake, William Wordsworth, Mary and Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron. [Pre-1900]

Study of major poems and manifestos from the late 19th century through the early 21st century. Examines works written in English, with some attention to Modernist texts from other cultures and other languages as well. Poems by T. S. Eliot, W. C. Williams, Langston Hughes, Robert Frost, Pablo Neruda, Hilda Doolittle, Charles Baudelaire, Anna Akhmatova, Bertolt Brecht, Rabindranath Tagore, and others. Comprised primarily of discussions, short papers, and a final project. May be repeated for credit with permission of instructor if content differs.

Analyzing core chapters of the great Chinese epic novel, Three Kingdoms, and its adaptations across diverse media, considers what underlies the appeal of this classic narrative over the centuries. Through focus on historical events in the period 206 BC to AD 280, examines the representation of power, diplomacy, war, and strategy, and explores the tension among competing models of political authority and legitimacy. Covers basic elements of classical Chinese political and philosophical thought, and literary and cultural history. Final group project involves digital humanities tools. Readings in translation. Films and video in Chinese with English subtitles. [Pre-1900]

(First Half-Term: Ends Oct 17) Introduces basics of ancient Greek: the language of Plato, Sophocles, Thucydides, Euclid, the New Testament, and more! Aimed at laying a foundation to begin reading ancient and/or medieval texts. Greek I and II may be combined (after completion of both) to count as a single HASS-H. [Pre-1900]

Introduction to reading Latin literature in the original language. Provides a bridge between the study of Latin grammar and the reading of Latin authors. Improves knowledge of the language through careful examination of literary texts, focusing on prose and poetry in alternate years. Builds proficiency in reading Latin and develops appreciation for basic features of style and genre. [Pre-1900]

A basic study of major French literary genres — poetry, drama, and fiction — and an introduction to methods of literary analysis. Authors include: Voltaire, Balzac, Sand, Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Camus, Sartre, Ionesco, Duras, and Tournier. Special attention devoted to the improvement of French language skills. Taught in French.

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

In our moment, the lyric poem has become one of the few vehicles for the formal of subjective experience, the voice of “the personal.” At least, that is how we popularly characterize the work the lyric does. But what happens when the lyric’s commitments to the personal, the sublime, or the psychological abut the facts of the social and political worlds and ideologies? How does the “personal” lyric reform when challenged by repressive regimes, absolutist ideologies, or historical traumas?  How do poetic forms and ambitions change? does the lyric poem adapt or resist, under such pressures? –or [less defensively], can lyric poetry serve a documentarian purpose? A subversive purpose?  Can it bear moral witness or provoke political change? Does poetry really make nothing happen? 

We begin the term by looking at several Anglo-American models for comparison –in part because in some cases international writers read those models as well [Walt Whitman, W.C, Williams, W. H. Auden, Audre Lorde, Langston Hughes].  We move through various genres and thematic modes [pressures on the lyric under totalitarian/rightist regimes, under occupation, under conditions of extreme poverty, in situations of repression based on gender or object-choice, in exile, under threat of linguistic extinction, and in other situations.] We consider whether literary Modernism was a dead-end, or incomplete project, and we consider how satire, or pastiche, or laughter, or formal reorganization, can also forms of social “testimony” or witness. We work through poems by South American and Spanish writers [Federico García Lorca, Gabriela Mistral, Antonio Machado, Pablo Neruda], Greek/North African [Constantine Cavafy], Russian [Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak], Ukranian and the Ukranian Diaspora [Taras Shevchenko, Ilya Kaminsky], Caribbean [Aimé Césaire], Palestinian [Mahmoud Darwish]. German [Paul Celan, Bertolt Brecht, Nelly Sachs]. and Polish [Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska]. 

Two disclaimers: (1) the reading-list tilts toward Eurocentrism because the languages of those countries are languages I feel confident about discussing (other competencies are welcome and invited!);  (2) North America’s robust tradition of poems-of-witness are not the focus of this seminar, because attention to those works is the focus in other seminars (where, I hope, students will encounter them). Discussion-format, in-class reports, final project. No final exam.

Barring natural catastrophes, the single most important factor enhancing human flourishing has been a society’s ability to conduct war with other means: diplomacy. This closely connects the arts of war to the arts of peace. Over the past two centuries Western European and American hegemony have globally enforced the “Westphalian system” of diplomacy, which relies on principles of the equal sovereignty of states, contractual obligations, and coalition-building. Yet, this system is currently failing in the face of strongman politics, world order polarization, mass migration, deep-rooted ethnic conflict, climate injustice, and gross inequality. How can we remake our diplomatic order in the service of collective human flourishing? And what diplomatic models across world history have encouraged the art of peace-making?

We explore this question through five modules. First, we take stock of our historical moment, examining the roots of today’s Westphalian world order and of the current failure of diplomacy. Next, we build our conceptual toolbox through a comparative reading of Sunzi’s Art of War, the Chinese best-seller of East Asian martial arts and civic cleverness, and Caesar’s Commentaries on the Civil War, studied by generations of European elites including the likes of Napoleon. We then immerse ourselves in different models of diplomatic practice across world history: diplomacies of smart deception (strategists), diplomacies of lavish representation (tribute empires), religious and stone & bone diplomacies (the papacy; and temple building and relic veneration), knowledge and science diplomacy (then and now!), and soft power diplomacies (cultural and public). Next, we consider real-word, yet virtual applications of the art of war and peace. We study historical K-drama as strategy primers and play both analog and video games of diplomacy with colleagues from the MIT Game Lab, critically assessing how our media culture primes us for success—or failure—of peace-making and human flourishing. The class reaches its highpoint with a “New Diplomacy Summit,” where students present their final projects—strategies and tools for building a better world through better diplomacy. These ideas will be tested in the real world in a final zoom meeting with diplomats and policy-makers associated with the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator: https://gesda.global/

Authors include Sunzi and Caesar, ancient India’s Kautilya and Machiavelli, East Asian diplomatic ambassadors and poets, the Secret History of the Mongols, the Ottoman Çelebi’s Book of Travels, the Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk, Joseph Nye and more. [Pre-1900]