Subject Offerings
To find subjects taught in previous semesters, you may also look at the archived Literature Supplements.
Fall 2024 Literature Supplement | IAP 2025 | Spring 2024 Literature Supplement |
Introductory
Same subject as: 21W.041[J]
Prereq: none
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-HW
This course offers an engaging journey through key literary and artistic texts that embrace play at the level of both content and form. From Lewis Carroll’s children’s books for adults to André Breton’s surreal games with the unconscious, students will analyze the status, function, and possibilities of play. We will also consider works, from Shakespeare to Zelda, that require active play to be fully realized. Through critical analysis and creative exploration students will learn to understand, analyze, and write about artistic texts, building confidence and enjoyment in their own writing. By the end of the course, students will emerge with a nuanced understanding of how play intertwines with artistic expression, as well as refined skills in critical analysis and scholarly writing. Beyond academic exploration, this course seeks to ignite a passion for playful inquiry and intellectual curiosity, empowering students to engage artistic texts with newfound depth and appreciation.
Prereq: none
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-H
This course examines foundational literary works from the Ancient Greeks and Romans to Medieval Europe. We’ll consider these works as sources of some very long-lasting traditions in the representation of love, desire, conflict, justice, the quest for knowledge, the scope or limits of human action, and human relations with the divine and animal realms. Works to be considered will most likely include: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey;Aeschylus’s Oresteia; Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone; Euripides’s The Bacchae; Virgil’s Aeneid; and Dante’s Inferno. [Pre-1900]
Prereq: none
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-H
Samples prose narrative from different traditions, examining texts that feature distinctive styles and formal rhythms in their social and historical contexts. May include European and US classics, alongside global and contemporary authors. Considers writing and reading as forms of social engagement, with special attention to the ways that authors borrow from and innovate on the past. Enrollment limited.
Prereq: none
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-H
An introduction to poetry in English, chiefly by British and American poets, spanning more than 400 years of literary history. The aim is to demystify “great” poetry and to analyze it collaboratively for insight and pleasure. We will explore Renaissance, eighteenth-century, Romantic, and modernist poetry in some detail. Though the organization of the subject is mostly 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. [Pre-1900]
Prereq: none
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-H
In this class we will read and discuss a lot of poems. We will also consider why so many people, going all the way back to Plato, have distrusted poets and despised their work. Among other activities, students will translate poetry into prose to see if there is something distinctive about poetic language; explore the many meanings that common words have gained and lost over the centuries, and think about how that matters; and collaborate with classmates on some poems to share with the class, then lead a discussion of them. Opportunities for writing will be many and varied.
Same subject as: 21W.042[J]
Prereq: none
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-HW
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.
Prereq: none
Units: 3-3-6 HASS-A, CI-H
What and why is cinema? These questions have been repeatedly asked by inventors, artists, theorists, and historians since the first photographic reproductions of movement on celluloid were produced over 130 years ago. Cinema has been called a method for scientific study; a tool for mass manipulation; documentary evidence; and a promise for liberation, to name a few. This course acts as an introduction to the ever-expanding field of cinema and media studies. We will study not only the history of moving images since their emergence but how that history was written and rewritten as a consequence of technological, cultural, and institutional conditions. Students will learn key terms for the close analysis and interpretation of media, become conversant in contemporary theoretical debates, and have opportunities to put theory into practice through essays and creative projects. Our objects of study will range from early silent cinema and classic Hollywood to independent cinema and the networked media environments of the present.
Prereq: none
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-H
How has “the West” been formed by narratives and shaped narrative forms? How do various media—from the epic, to cinema, and networked environments—shape our perceptions of time, space, and ourselves? In this course, we address these questions across major narrative genres of the Western canon. We will also engage seminal theories of history, time, and identity—examining how they have structured and sought to critique Western narratives. Particular emphasis will be placed on analyzing how historical developments of media technologies have afforded novel configurations of identity and self-narration.
Prereq: none
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-H
“The Art of the Probable” addresses the history of scientific ideas, in particular the emergence and development of mathematical probability. But it is neither meant to be a history of the exact sciences per se nor an annex to, say, the Course 6 curriculum in probability and statistics. Rather, we will focus on the formal, thematic, and rhetorical features that imaginative literature shares with texts in the history of probability. These shared issues include (but are not limited to): the attempt to quantify or otherwise explain the presence of chance, risk, and contingency in everyday life; the deduction of causes for phenomena that are knowable only in their effects; and, above all, the question of what it means to think and act rationally in an uncertain world. Readings include work by Aristotle, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Dostoevsky, Darwin, H.G. Wells, Thomas Pynchon, Tom Stoppard, and more. [Pre-1900]
Same subject as: 21G.076[J]
Prereq: none
Units: 3-0-6 HASS-H, CI-H
This subject examines the cultural, artistic, social, and political impact of globalization across international borders in an historical context. Novels and short stories as well as case studies on global health, human trafficking, and labor migration illuminate the shaping influence of contemporary globalization on gender, race, ethnicity, and class. Guest lecturers visit class as we examine the impact of globalization on cultural identity, the arts, the politics of language, and the media. How has migration changed notions of cultural and racial hybridity? What can we learn from specific examples of global media and expressive culture including popular music and film? In what ways has globalization affected human rights? Students develop sensitivity to other cultures and the ability to read broadly across national boundaries. Furthermore, the emphasis on the historical context gives students a foundation to continue work in literature, history, and the arts from a global perspective.
Prereq: none
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-H
What’s so funny about being modern? This subject will consider how films, novels, and graphic memoirs imagine the pursuit of happiness despite the varied and vast forms of alienation that characterize modern life. Students will consider work by Charlie Chaplin, Samuel Beckett, Percival Everett, Mohsin Hamid, Alison Bechdel, and many others.
Prereq: none
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-H
Introduction to literary works associated with existentialism, a nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical movement known for its exploration of fundamental questions about the individual in modernity. Existentialist writers, artists, and philosophers focused on what it means that human beings exist finitely, oriented towards their own death; to what extent free will and reason are or are not governing principles of existence and action; how an individual might live a meaningful life in a society that itself is sick, illogical, absurd or without meaning; how catastrophes and the devastations of war upend understandings of ethics; and what forms of sensation adequately describe the contemporary human experience—waiting, disgust, nausea, anguish, anxiety, estrangement and alienation, confusion or boredom, or perhaps radical doubt? This course explores the aesthetic languages that existentialist writers and artists deployed to think through these fundamental questions, ones with which twenty-first-century thinkers are still grappling.
Works include Sartre, Nausea and No Exit; Camus, The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus; Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground; Beckett, Waiting for Godot; Kafka, The Trial and Metamorphosis; Hesse, Steppenwolf; Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; short stories by Kate Chopin; aphorisms by Nietzsche; and selected contemporary novels and films.
Prereq: none
Units: 3-0-9 CI-H, HASS-H
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.
Same subject as: 21G.041[J]
Prereq: none
Units: 3-0-9 CI-H
Today we have the luxury of reading more literatures in more languages than ever before, giving us the opportunity to explore the great diversity of what is called “literature” across the time and space of world history. This course introduces you to some of the most seminal and thought-provoking texts from East Asia (China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam), and is conceived as complementary to the Foundations of Western Literature course in the Literature curriculum. We persistently ask how “literature” looks different when viewed through the literary heritage of East Asia: what does poetry written in Chinese characters accomplish that alphabetic poetry cannot? How does Buddhist reincarnation change the way you tell stories and devise novels?
Why is Japan the world’s only major literature where female authors dominated certain literary genres as early as the 11th century? How did the complex interplay in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam between high-brow literature in the cosmopolitan language of Literary Chinese, and vernacular or popular literatures expand the possibilities of literary expressivity, gender figuration, and identity play? What was it that made American avantgarde writers of the Beat generation so ecstatic about classical Chinese and Japanese poetry?
Our strategic journey through East Asian literatures and cultures will take us through philosophical master texts such as Confucius, Laozi, and Zhuangzi; Tang poetry; China’s classical novels such as Journey to the West; Japan’s female-authored tales and diaries, such as The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book; Korea’s classical novel The Nine Cloud Dream, and the heart-wrenching pansori play Song of Ch’unhyang. [Pre-1900]
Same subject as: 21G.044[J], 21G.195, WGS.235[J]
Prereq: none
Units: 3-0-9 H
This course offers a panoramic overview of classical Chinese literature—the world’s oldest continuous literary tradition still alive. As we read texts from a breath-taking span of three thousand years (some originally inscribed on turtle shells and bamboo strips!) we will learn how to appreciate the interventions writers made in their own time and cultural context, while also grasping their significance, comparatively, in the broader context of literary traditions from around the world.
While focusing on first-hand encounters with original works in English translation (we will examine poetry, philosophy, history, rhapsodies, drama, short stories and several great classical novels), we will ask questions such as: what distinctive role did writing and literature come to play in Chinese society over the course of China’s many dynasties? How did the genres Chinese authors developed shape the content of their works and help articulate their desires, fears, hopes, creative fancies, and their ideas about life and death, virtue and violence, love, belief and knowledge, and the human condition? What does classical Chinese literature have to offer to readers and writers in today’s global world?
As we read across three millennia, we will have the unique privilege to witness in fast-forward motion, like in a historical laboratory, how Chinese authors increasingly adapted, satirized, rewrote or resisted earlier literary themes and models as their literary tradition grew older and ever more diverse. All texts are in translation. No language skills are required. [Pre-1900]
Samplings (6 - units)
Prereq: none
Units: 2-0-4 Can be repeated for credit; first half of term
(Full Term) This 6-credit class will take you through a sampling of 21st-century speculative fiction. The 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 novels that make use of this radical capacity in order to challenge the oppressive structures of race, gender, 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. Assessment (presentations, short written responses, and leading group projects) is based on consistent participation and engagement throughout the semester, rather than being heavily weighted towards a final assignment.
Prereq: none
Units: 2-0-4 Can be repeated for credit
[Full Term] Overturn the government. Invent your own belief system. Go blind. Then rewrite “Genesis,” and reimagine the origins of everything: culture, knowledge, gender, human beings, and the universe. That’s the story behind John Milton’s Paradise Lost: arguably the greatest epic poem written in English.
The focus of the class will be on reading and discussion of Milton’s text. Work will include frequent, informal writing, leading discussions, one or two short quizzes, and a final reflection paper. [Pre-1900]
Prereq: none
Units: 2-0-4 Can be repeated for credit
[First Half Term: Ends Oct 18] In this six-unit Samplings subject, we read poems (chiefly lyrics, all in English) written the “first person” and voiced as “I” (and sometimes as “we.”) We start with the Romantic egotistical sublime (chiefly John Clare, William Wordsworth) and wonder how this tradition is grounded in the grand subjective negativity of Satan in Milton’s “Paradise Lost”; then we move through 19th century attempts to broaden or refine their position (emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning), then modernist assertions that poetry is “impersonal “ anyway (Eliot , Gertrude Stein , Langston Hughes, Ravindranath Tagore, Ezra Pound’s translations of Chinese poems .)We move through the confessional poets (Plath,Sexton), and their reliance on existentialist self-assertion., then conclude with recent work (Elizabeth Bishop, Florence Anthony, Joy Harjo) that joins the personal with social-group identification and collective identities. Along the way, we look at parallel descriptions of “identity” formation from other discourse: Freudian psychology, ego psychology, narrative theory, liberationist ideologies, and questions of situated knowledge. Discussions, several short papers.
Prereq: none
Units: 2-0-4 Can be repeated for credit
This 6-credit class will take you through a sampling of bestselling 21st-century fiction and science fiction, where we will cover topics such as climate crisis, public health, and social and economic inequity. We will read novels, short stories, and poetry that not only represent the current moment, but that also use fiction as a way to imagine better worlds. Assessment (presentations, short written responses, and group projects) is based on consistent participation and engagement throughout the semester, rather than a final paper.
Intermediate
Prereq: 21G.304 or permission of instructor
Units: 3-0-9 H
This course explores the literary, political and social traditions of “la chanson française” from the early twentieth century until now. It also discusses the influence of world music, including American and British pop and rock music.
Students will investigate individual careers, as well as generational phenomenon, such as cabaret songs, yéyés, French rap, symphonic songs, etc. They will analyze the impact of social media on the music industry in France, the relations between “la chanson française” and French cinema, the richness of francophone music (Raï, Zouk, Mbalax, Belgian realism, and Québécois lyricism), the influence of musicals and living art, and the political role of “la chanson française.”
Prereq: One intermediate subject in French or permission of instructor
Units: 3-0-9
This course examines social and literary trends in France since 1990. It studies the impact of the dominant social, political, economic, and cultural events of the past 20 years on fiction and writing. Themes include the legacy of France’s colonial experience, the re-examination of its wartime past, memory and the Holocaust, the specter of AIDS, changing gender relationships, new families, the economic crisis, the quest for personal identity, and immigration narratives.
Prereq: 21L.011 or permission of instructor
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H; Can be repeated for credit
Timeless classic, blockbuster hit, or guilty pleasure? Genre films consistently captivate audiences and drive viewership in the film industry. In this course, students will rigorously analyze the definitive films that have shaped the cinematic imaginary of classic film genres. It provides an in-depth exploration of the concept of film genre, enhancing students’ understanding of how different genres are constructed, deconstructed, and evolve over time. From Westerns to Horror, we will consider how films such as John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) >and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) establish, subvert, or transform film genres, paying particular attention to film style and the interplay between genre, ideology, and societal commentary. Students will become familiar with key theories and concepts related to film genre and deploy them in their own scholarly and/or creative work.
Prereq: none
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H
What does it mean to be free? Is freedom a state of mind? An inalienable property of the self? The absence of coercive or oppressive structures?
Such questions often inspire philosophers to develop thought experiments about alternative worlds. These same questions also lie at the heart of many major works in science fiction. This subject will put the two together—philosophy and science fiction—to consider speculative techniques for imagining freedom. Students will consider work by Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Kazuo Ishiguro, Isaiah Berlin, Robert Nozick, Saidiya Hartman, and many others.
Same subject as: 21W.738[J], WGS.238[J]
Prereq: none
Units: 3-0-9
Explores the memoir genre through a feminist intersectional lens, looking at the ways in which feminist writers ground personal experience within a complex understanding of race, gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, immigration status/nationality, and dis/ablity. Gives particular attention to the relationships between the personal and the political; form and content; fact, truth, and imagination; self and community; trauma and healing; coming to voice and breaking silence. Readings include books by Audre Lorde, Janet Mock, Daisy Hernandez, Jessica Valenti, and Ariel Gore, and shorter pieces by Meena Alexander and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. Drawing on lessons taken from these works, students write a short memoir of their own.
Same subject as: WGS.250
Prereq: none
Units: 3-0-9 H
During the first years of the HIV/AIDS crisis, in the eighties and early nineties, activists protested across major cities demanding government action, some of them still hooked up to IV drips and oxygen tanks; alongside them, writers, visual artists, and filmmakers continued creating, many up until their last breath. This course examines the relationship between different forms of cultural expression—from art to activism—during those first fifteen years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, prior to the advent of highly active antiretroviral therapy. In particular, we will analyze the way in which mainstream narratives about the disease associated it with Blackness and queerness. With a focus on the work of Black queer and trans creators and activists, we will also study how literature, film, and visual art were mobilized against these mainstream narratives in order to effect changes in public consciousness and even policy. Finally, we will discuss the legacy of these cultural responses, particularly as it pertains to communities of color. We will do so through close readings across a variety of genres and media: fiction, poetry, film, theater, television, journalism, popular music, painting, sculpture, performance, and installation art. Some of the works we will analyze include: Samuel Delany’s The Tale of Plagues and Carnival; Octavia Butler’s Fledgling; Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother; Sapphire’s Push and its screen adaptation Precious; the films of Marlon Riggs; and the latest season of the television series Pose.
Prereq: One subject in Literature
Units: 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 turn-of-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
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H; Can be repeated for credit
Works by major American novelists, beginning with the late 18th century and concluding with a contemporary novelist. Major emphasis on reading novels as literary texts, but attention paid to historical, intellectual, and political contexts as well. Syllabus varies from term to term, but many of the following writers are represented: Rowson, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Wharton, James, and Toni Morrison. Previously taught topics include The American Revolution and Makeovers (i.e. adaptations and reinterpretation of novels traditionally considered as American “Classics”). May be repeated for credit with instructor’s permission so long as the content differs. [Pre-1900]
Same subject as: 24.916[J]
Prereq: none
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H
hƿæt ƿe gardena in geardagum þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon…
Those are the first words of the Old English epic Beowulf, and in this class you will learn to read them.
Besides being the language of Rohan in the novels of Tolkien, Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon) is a language of long, cold, and lonely winters; of haunting beauty found in unexpected places; and of unshakable resolve in the face of insurmountable odds. It is, in short, the perfect language for MIT students.
We will read greatest hits from the epic Beowulf as well as moving laments (The Wanderer, Wulf and Eadwacer, The Wife’s Lament), the personified Cross’s psychedelic and poignant account of the Crucifixion (The Dream of the Rood), and riddles whose solutions range from the sacred to the obscene but are always ingenious. [Pre-1900]
Prereq: none
Units: 3-0-3; first half of term
[First Half Term: Ends Oct 18] Introduces rudiments of ancient Greek – the language of Plato, Sophocles, Thucydides, and Euclid, and the basis for that of the New Testament – to students with little or no prior knowledge of the subject. Aimed at laying a foundation to begin reading ancient and/or medieval texts. Greek I and Greek II may be combined (after completion of both) to count as a single HASS-H. [Pre-1900]
Prereq: 21L.607 or permission of instructor
Units: 3-0-3; second half of term
[Second Half Term: Begins Oct 21] Introductory Greek subject for students with some prior knowledge of basic grammar and vocabulary. Intended to refresh and enrich ability to read ancient and/or medieval literary and historical texts. May be taken independently of Greek I with permission of instructor. Greek I and Greek II may be combined (after completion of both) to count as a single HASS-H. [Pre-1900]
Prereq: none
Units: 2-0-4 HASS-H
[First Half Term: Ends Oct 18] 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]
Prereq: none
Units: 2-0-4 HASS-H
[First Half Term: Ends Oct 18] Building on 21L.613, this course develops students’ ability to read and analyze Latin literary texts, focusing on prose and poetry in alternate years. Increases fluency in reading comprehension and recognition of stylistic, generic, and grammatical features. May be repeated once for credit if content differs. 21L.613 and 21L.614, or two terms of 21L.614, may be combined by petition (after completion of both) to count as a single HASS-H. [Pre-1900]
Same subject as: 21G.739[J]
Prereq: One intermediate subject in Spanish or permission of instructor
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H
What do we actually mean by “Latin America”? Is it possible to talk meaningfully about a common identity in a region with such enormous racial, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity? We will tackle these questions by studying contemporary film, literature, popular music, television, and visual art. In particular, we will study cultural exchanges between Latin America and the rest of the world. How do Latin Americans consume (or resist) foreign goods, ideas, and influences? How do Latin American writers, directors, and artists create work that speaks to both local and international audiences?
Course materials will include a focus on work produced by Black and Indigenous authors, filmmakers, artists, and performers from the region. Taught in Spanish.
Seminars
Prereq: Two subjects in Literature
Units: 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 emotionally 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 “productive and fructifying.” As we allow ourselves the opportunity to meditate on her writings, during the course of the semester, 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 read most of her novels, some of her speeches, her short story “Recitatif,” and critical essays about her work.
Prereq: Two subjects in Literature
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-M; Can be repeated for credit
For the purposes of this course, we will explore what it means to pretend—borrowing in part from J.L. Austin’s sense of the term, i.e., to “disguise reality”—with a special emphasis on poems within the black expressive tradition. In conversation with writers like Toni Morrison, Herman Melville, Gwendolyn Brooks, Harriet Jacobs, Paul Laurence Dunbar and others, we will engage this issue as it appears in both literary works and the historical record via a discrete set of social and political practices: the use of invisible protagonists; a 19th-century school taking place in a hole in the ground; the fugitive enslaved on the run, re-working the written word to become someone else, or else teleport themselves many miles away. Together, we will engage with a range of approaches to thinking about the uses of opacity in everyday life, the value of sincerity vs. authenticity, and the relationship between the masks we wear and the desire to preserve what we believe to be most valuable, vulnerable, and true.
Prereq: Two subjects in Literature
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-M; Can be repeated for credit
This seminar will examine three major works by the great modernist writer James Joyce (1882-1941): the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and the colossal modern (mock-) epic Ulysses (1922). Time permitting, we may also consider a brief sample of Finnegans Wake (1939). Through oral reports and other means, students will learn about the historical context in which Joyce lived and created his work, though our main focus will be the increasingly complex and marvelous texts themselves. Student work will include oral reports, frequent short reading-response papers, and a final creative or critical project on some aspect of Ulysses.
Same subject as: CMS.830
Prereq: 21L.011, one subject in Literature or Comparative Media Studies; or permission of instructor
Units: 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.