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; read all 154 Shakespeare sonnets to see if they’re really as good as most people seem to think (don’t worry, we’ll read many authors besides Shakespeare!); and find a poem they love (or hate, or otherwise feel inspired to share), assign it to the class, and lead a discussion of it. Opportunities for writing will be many and varied.

Four hundred and ten years after his death, William Shakespeare remains not only the central author of the English-speaking world but the most quoted poet and most regularly produced playwright on earth. His writing is among the most popular sources for novelists, screenwriters, and digital creators as well. Why is that, and who “is” he? What meanings did his plays have in his own time, and how do—and should— we read, speak, or listen to his words now? How should we perform his plays, and whose plays are we recreating, anyway? We’ll consider these questions as we examine a sampling of Shakespeare’s plays from a variety of critical perspectives (among them, literary, cultural, theatrical, and filmic). Texts will span the diverse genres of comedy, tragedy and history that his friends used to sort his plays, as well as the modern media and global cultures to which he’s been translated. Students will gain skills in communication, teamwork, interpretation, research, and self-expression, and discover direct connections between our subject and fields such as Music and Theater Arts, History, Philosophy, Comparative Media Studies, Ancient and Medieval Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies. Alongside The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Henry IV Part I, Henry V, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Othello, we will explore videos from across the globe, spinoffs, and scholarship, and will try to envision Shakespearean futures. [Pre-1900]

Films are familiar to you; this course should make them strange again.

The Film Experience serves as an introduction to film studies, concentrating on close analysis and criticism. Students will learn the technical vocabulary for analyzing cinematic narrative, framing, editing, color, sound, and lighting; develop the critical means for turning close analysis into interpretations and comparative readings of films; and explore theoretical issues related to spectatorship, reflexivity, and ideology. We will look beyond the surface pleasures of cinema to ask how films are put together; what choices are made formally, narratively, and politically in the constructions of different types of films; and how films have changed historically and in different production and national contexts. We will study a wide example of works made between 1895 and 2023 and heralding from over a dozen countries, ranging from early silent experiments, documentary and avant-garde films, and canonical European art cinema, to contemporary Hollywood blockbusters, Hong Kong melodrama, and Iranian cinema. Directors include Ana Lily Amirpour, Maya Deren, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean-Luc Godard, Greta Gerwig, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, David Lynch, Roberto Rossellini, Quentin Tarantino, Orson Welles, and Wong Kar-wai.

Format: one required 90-minute lecture, one required evening screening, and one discussion hour per week.

“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.

Children’s creative contributions to culture are often belittled, ignored, and forgotten, rather than being judged worthy of preservation, sustained study, and critical analysis. This course therefore constitutes a bold experiment in reclamation, whereby we co-investigate the following question: What happens if we try to build a whole class around cultural artifacts that children themselves had a hand in creating?

We will begin by exploring the leading role that Native American, Jewish, and Black children (and their teachers) played in paving the way for a golden decade of youth participation in American culture that stretched from 1965 to 1975. Besides analyzing playground chants, diaries, and picture books based on children’s sayings and stories, we will also study child-crafted films, poetry, and novellas, as well as plays, TV shows, photo books, and dances co-created by children and adults. In addition, contrasting how Holocaust-era children’s artwork was received compared to contemporary Palestinian children’s art will allow us to explore why and how adults appropriate, rewrite, and sometimes even censor children’s creative efforts.

To expand and enrich our understanding of this archive, all students will be required to choose a single cultural artifact created or co-created by a child to do an in-depth oral presentation on, which you will then expand into a final essay. You might choose to dig up and scrutinize a story that you yourself wrote when you were young; or identify and analyze a particularly cool contribution to a new media trend involving children; or deepen your understanding of one of the cultural artifacts that’s already on the syllabus by doing some additional independent research that you use to contextualize and enrich your close reading of it.

Whatever type of cultural artifact we are discussing in this seminar-style class, we will grapple with the following questions: What vision of childhood emerges in this artwork? Does it differ from how childhood tends to get represented in similar material created solely by adults? How is the adult-child relationship depicted? How do power asymmetries related to age, gender, ethnicity, and class affect the creation, content, and reception of this cultural artifact? And finally, what difference does the type of media being employed make, especially in terms of what liberties and rewards, risks and dangers are being afforded to young artists?

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, indigenous studies, queer studies, and feminism into ourdiscussions. Some of the authors we will read include Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin, Toni Morrison, Samuel Delany, Gabriel García Márquez, and José María Arguedas; films we will watch include Sinners, Nope, Neptune Frost, and Embrace of the Serpent; and pop culture narratives we will study include Janelle Monáe’s Metropolis Suite, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda, Disney’s Encanto, and Beyoncé’s Black is King.

(Second half of semester) Examines intersections and channels of influence between the sciences and forms of imaginative literature. Addresses topics such as depictions of scientific experimentation in imaginative works, the history of scientific experimentation, and experimentation in literary works; the emergence of science fiction; and depictions of scientific practice in literature. May be repeated once for credit if content differs.

This course examines diverse Indigenous films, television shows, and novels from Turtle Island (Canada & the United States). Students will study a wide variety of influential and popular Indigenous works of art, including activist-based documentaries, adventure comedies, memoirs, dystopian novels, sitcoms, and animations. These works challenge accepted historical and contemporary fictions that sustain settler-colonial forms of domination, offering poignant correctives to the misrepresentations of Indigenous peoples that have dominated popular culture in the region. We will also consider the larger historical, legal, and political contexts to which these works respond.

How have Americans experienced and represented girlhood, over time and across genres? In this course, we will trace how girlhood has been portrayed in the U.S. from the eighteenth century to the present, with a special focus on works that center the experiences of Black, Jewish, Asian American, trans, and Muslim girls.

We will begin close to home, with two writers who composed their famous works in and around the Boston area: the enslaved Black teenager Phillis Wheatley (who published the first volume of poetry by an African American in modern times) and the white feminist and abolitionist novelist Louisa May Alcott (whose girls’ book Little Women quickly became a classic that has inspired multiple generations of women). To build community and learn more about these authors, we will take field trips to local sites such the African American History Museum and Alcott’s Orchard House (where Little Women was written and set).

As we shift into studying 20th and 21st century films, novels, TV shows, and pop songs about girlhood, we will examine how such cultural artifacts themselves invite us to consider the role that cultural artifacts play in shaping girlhood. We will also encounter and analyze the popularity of both gender and age drag in contemporary portrayals of girlhood. In so doing, we will focus not just on the uneasy sense of displacement, unease, and exclusion that sometimes attends girlhood, but also on cultural artifacts that center girls’ positive feelings of rootedness, kinship, and joy, celebrating their inspiring ambitions and invigorating desires.

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. [Pre-1900]

(Second half of semester) Introduces basics of ancient Greek (with some prior knowledge of basic grammar and vocabulary): 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]

[First half of the semester] Develops critical understanding of queer theory through foundational and contemporary texts and other media forms. Examines relationships between queer theory and other social and cultural theories that probe and critique power, privilege, and normativity including critical race theory, transgender studies, feminist theory, and disability theory. Topics may include social movements, queer of color critiques, transnational activisms, and transgender politics. [Pre-1900]

Examines French politics since 1958. Analyzes how politics has deeply influenced cultural and social life in France, including daily interactions. Questions public controversies and history’s political cleavages, from the Algerian war to postcolonial issues, from the birth of the European construction to the rise of populist movements. To explore French institutions and understand the impact of political issues in contemporary France, students “run” for the French presidency by preparing historical notes, delivering speeches, participating in a first-round presidential debate, and submitting a final political statement. Taught in French.

(Second half of semester) Covers topics in Latin classes that are not provided in the regular subject offerings. May be repeated for credit if topic differs. [Pre-1900]

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 lyrics’ commitments to the personal, the sublime, or the psychological about 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 an incomplete project, and how satire, pastiche, laughter, or formal reorganization can also be 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], Ukrainian and the Ukrainian 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 competences 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.

“Ce n’est pas du sang, c’est du rouge.” [ It’s not blood; it’s red. ]

—Jean-Luc Godard

The history of film theory has been the history of ignoring color.   Treated as a minor detail,  ornament, or gimmick, and aligned with degraded cultural modes such as the feminine, the exotic, and the melodramatic, a rigorous aesthetics of color has only recently received due scholarly attention. This seminar explores those aesthetic issues in addition to the affective, political, ethical and interpretive possibilities made available by taking color seriously.  Although we will briefly study innovations in color film cinematography (attending to early hand-tinted films and the development of Technicolor), our focus will be on theoretical questions: How have philosophers defined color and how have these accounts moved between chromophobia and chromophilia (deriding or fetishizing it)? How does a logic of color work in specific genres and modes (melodrama, horror, surrealism, animation)? How is color linked to desire, excess, and other formal areas including sound, duration, space and movement? How is color attached to specific (gendered,  raced) bodies? How is color linked to violence and how is color affectively provocative? Readings from philosophers, art historians, and film theorists pair with films early and recent from all over the globe, including: The Wizard of Oz, Kill Bill,  Blue, Raise the Red Lantern, Sombre, Vertigo, Red Desert,  Fantasia,  Written on the Wind, Schindler’s List, The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover, Blue is the Warmest Color, Contempt, Don’t Look Now,  Three Colors Trilogy, and In the Mood for Love. In addition to the lecture, there will be an optional weekly four hour film screening. Prerequisite: 21L.011, one subject in Literature or Comparative Media Studies; or permission of instructor.