Subject Offerings
To find subjects taught in previous semesters, you may also look at the archived Literature Supplements.
| Spring 2025 Literature Supplement | IAP 2025 | Fall 2024 Literature Supplement |
Introductory
Prereq: none
Units: 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
Intermediate
Prereq: 21L.011 or permission of instructor
Units: 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.
Same subject as: CMS.840
Prereq: One subject in Literature or Comparative Media Studies
Units: 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
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H; Can be repeated for credit
Topics: Improves Close Reading, Studies Adaptations or Translations, Thinks about Gender or Sexuality, Thinks about Race or Class
This course will feature a detailed examination of the Iliad and Odyssey as two great poems of the ancient world, with a focus on oral poetry as the wider context of their creation. Topics will include the historicity of the Trojan war, orality and literacy in archaic Greece, the question of one or many Homer(s), the structure of the poems, representations of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, and the degree to which Homeric concepts (of mind, time, speech, glory, and justice, among others) match our own.
Prereq: none
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-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
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H
Topics: Improves Close Reading, Improves Oral Communication, Thinks about Gender or Sexuality, Thinks about Popular Culture, Thinks about Race or Class
Tradition and innovation in a representative sampling of novels and shorter fiction by the great English and European modernists – Conrad, Woolf, Joyce, Kafka, and others. Recurring topics will include the role of the artist in the modern period, the representation of sexual and psychological experience, shifting attitudes toward gender roles and social class, and the aggressively experimental character of so many modern texts. Early classes stress modern literature’s connection to social and cultural forces especially the great Impressionist painters and their followers.
Prereq: One subject in Literature
Units: 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: One subject in Literature, permission of instructor
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H; Can be repeated for credit
Topics: Improves Oral Communication, 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 Visual Materials/Film/Media
What do writers who are mostly famous for their works of prose fiction have to say and how do they necessarily speak their minds differently when they’re writing essays instead of novels? What can this kind of ambidexterity teach us about why some thoughts need to be novels while other thoughts really just need to be essays? Do the essays of novelists have a certain “je ne sais quoi” that the essays of those who, perhaps, have never written a novel seem to lack? Can a novel begin as an essay? What essay has a writer’s own novel inspired that writer to pen after the novel’s publication? What can these essays teach us about experimenting, thinking, assembling, preparing, and organizing our way toward clearheaded and ethical actions in the real world? These are some of the questions that we’ll answer throughout the course of the semester as we read essays by James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ralph Ellison, Truman Capote, and others.
Seminars
Prereq: Two subjects in Literature
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-M; Can be repeated for credit
Topics: Thinks about Gender or Sexuality, Thinks about Race or Class, Works with Visual Materials/Film/Media
Is this the only possible world? Or are there ones free of white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and ecological devastation? What might it mean not just to imagine other possibilities but to listen for the 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, Space is the Place, The Devil’s Knot, and Embrace of the Serpent; and pop culture narratives we will study include Beyoncé’s Black is King, Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer, Barry Jenkins’ The Underground Railroad, Disney’s Encanto and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda.
Prereq: Two subjects in Literature
Units: 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, Thinks about Gender or Sexuality, Works with Archives
After the medieval legends of King Arthur, and before modern fantasy novels and role-playing games, lies Spenser’s epic poem, The Faerie Queene. FQ – written by a contemporary of Shakespeare’s – weaves together quests, moral allegory, political argument, apocalyptic vision, gender play and comedy into a sequence of multi-layered stories loosely connected by the youthful Arthur’s search for the Faerie Queene. Each of its major characters seeks to complete a series of tasks and ordeals linked to one of the qualities a perfect man should have. At least, that’s the job the poet initially sets out to do…
Work for the class will include visual plot summaries, short research presentations on student-originated topics, close reading, some instruction focused on Spenser’s language, and a major project with multiple options.
Same subject as: CMS.830
Prereq: 21L.011, one subject in Literature or Comparative Media Studies; or permission of instructor
Units: 3-0-9 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.
Prereq: Two subjects in Literature or permission of instructor
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-M; Can be repeated for credit
Topics: Improves Close Reading, Improves Oral Communication, Thinks about Gender or Sexuality, Thinks about Popular Culture, Thinks about Race or Class, Thinks about Social Justice Issues
Cookbooks can tell us how to bake a really good chocolate cake, but what is it we find when we read between the lines? Not only sources of recipes, cookbooks are also windows into the worlds that produced them, revealing what foods were available (and to whom), what technologies were used, who cooked (and for whom), and what food meant to the people who produced, transported, processed, cooked, and ate it. In this class we will give the same care and attention to American cookbooks and food blogs that are often given more traditional forms of writing. We will focus on women’s contributions because historically it was through domestic manuals, recipes, and cookery books that women expressed themselves. Even today, with so many avenues open to them, women continue to dominate both cookbook publishing and the culinary blogosphere.