[bioundgrd] Fwd: Open Subjects in Literature

[Janice Chang]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Daria Johnson <dalesej at MIT.EDU<mailto:dalesej at MIT.EDU>>
Date: September 6, 2013 11:33:55 AM EDT
Subject: Open Subjects in Literature
________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Good Morning Students,

Please see below subjects that are still open for enrollment in Literature. There are openings in some of our CI-H, Samplings, Intermediate, and Seminar (CI-M) subjects.

21L.000J / 21W.734J Writing about Literature
TR 2:30 - 4:00 Hass-H/CI-HW
Section 1: Arthur Bahr<http://lit.mit.edu/people/abahr.php>
Students, scholars, bloggers, reviewers, fans, and book-group members write about literature, but so do authors themselves. Through the ways they engage with their own texts and those of other artists, writers reflect on and inspire questions about the creative process. We will examine Mary Shelley's shaping of Frankenstein (1818) from the dark materials of Milton's Paradise Lost, German fairy tales, tales of scientific discovery, and her husband's poems; Melville's redesign of a nautical travel adventure into a Gothic novella in Benito Cereno (1856); and Alison Bechdel's rewriting of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) in her graphic novel Fun Home (2006).
21L.000J / 21W.734J Writing about Literature: On Poets and Poetry
MW 3:30 - 5:00 Hass-H/CI-HW
Section 2: Noel Jackson<http://lit.mit.edu/people/njackson.php>
How information is presented affects the meanings it conveys; a poem is fundamentally different from a play, a movie, a novel, and an opera, even if all of them tell the same "story." In this class, we will think closely, talk energetically, and write critically about the complicated relationship between form and content. Our case studies will be a wide range of works that grapple with big themes: love and society, treachery and death, good and evil. Readings will include most and perhaps all of the following: poems (by William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and Elizabeth Bishop), a play (Sheridan, The School for Scandal), an opera (Mozart, Cosi Fan Tutte), several cultures’ versions of a fairy tale ("Sleeping Beauty"), a few movies (Sleeping Beauty, Dangerous Liaisons, Cruel Intentions), and two short novels (Austen, Lady Susan; Waugh, The Loved One).

 21L.005: Introduction to Drama
TR 3:30 - 5:00 Hass-A/Hass-D1/CI-H
Instructor: Anne Fleche<http://lit.mit.edu/people/afleche.php>
Drama might be described as a game played with something sacred. It tells stories that go right to the heart of what people believe about themselves. And it is enacted in the moment, lending it an added layer of interpretive mystery and playfulness, or "theatricality." We will explore theater and theatricality across periods and cultures, through intensive engagement with performance texts. We will study and discuss plays that exemplify different kinds of dramatic structure. Class members will also attend and review dramatic performances and have a chance to perform scenes on their own. In addition to modern and contemporary plays, readings will range from ancient Greece to Medieval England, Renaissance Spain and Classical Japan.
21L.006: American Literature
TR 3:30 - 5:00 Hass-H/Hass-D1/CI-H
Instructor: Sandy Alexandre<http://lit.mit.edu/people/salexandre.php>
This course surveys the texts and contexts that have shaped and continue to shape American literature. From Walt Whitman's proud assertion of an American selfhood in "Song of Myself" (1855) to Junot Díaz's engaging and complex consideration of national identity in The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), we will explore multiple versions of American identity as they have developed through time, across different regions both inside and outside the US, and through representation in prose narrative, poetry, and drama. Readings include, but are not limited to the following authors: Henry James, Elizabeth Bishop, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Sherman Alexie, Gish Jen, Toni Morrison.

 21L.007 World Literatures
TR 9:30 - 11:00 Hass-H/Hass-D1/CI-H
Instructor: William Donaldson<http://lit.mit.edu/people/wdonaldson.php>
The class looks at the forces of globalization, post-colonialism, internal-colonialism and cultural imperialism that have bound large parts of it together down the centuries. Areas of particular focus include the poetry of the eighth-century Chinese Tang Dynasty and its reception in the west; novels and poetry from twentieth-century Africa with related patterns of cultural diffusion and appropriation; and poetry and drama from Scotland, shedding light upon writing from the periphery and the possibility of long-term resistance to cultural hegemony.
21L.009 Shakespeare
TR 3:30 - 5:00 Hass-H/Hass-D1/CI-H
Section 1: Pete Donaldson<http://lit.mit.edu/people/pdonaldson.php>

TR 2:30 - 4:00 Hass-H/Hass-D1/CI-H
Section 2: Shankar Raman<http://lit.mit.edu/people/sraman.php>
We will focus on three or four plays by Shakespeare, drawn from different genres. Close reading of the texts will be accompanied by examining how they have been adapted and performed around the world, on film and in theatre. Students will watch different versions of the plays chosen, reflecting upon how staging them in different ways and contexts changes our understanding of the texts and their cultural impact. We may also attend one or more theatrical performances, depending on what is available in the Boston area in the Spring semester. Plays selected will probably include: Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Tempest.

21L.011 The Film Experience
Lecture: T 4:00 - 5:00
Screenings: T 7:00 - 10:00pm
Recitations: R 3:00 - 4:00 or 4:00 - 5:00
Hass-A/Hass-D3/CI-H
Instructor: David Thorburn<http://lit.mit.edu/people/dthorburn.php>
This subject will examine a series of classic films by American and European directors, with emphasis on the historical evolution of the film medium and on the cultural and artistic importance of individual films. The course will be organized in three segments: 1. The Silent Era (films by Griffith, Chaplin, Keaton, Murnau); 2. Hollywood Genres (Hitchcock, Ford, Kelly, Fosse, Altman); and 3. International Masters (Renoir, De Sica or Fellini, others). All films will be shown on Tuesday evenings and will be available on videocassette or DVD to assist students in the writing of essays and in preparation for exams. Two lectures, one recitation meeting per week. Lectures are held on Tuesdays, 4-5 pm and 7-8 pm. Both are required. The week's screening follows the evening lecture.
<http://lit.mit.edu/program/fall13_introductory.php#top>


21L.012 Forms of Western Narrative
Lecture: MW 2:30 - 4:00
Screenings: T 7:00 - 10:00pm
Hass-H/Hass-D1/CI-H
Instructor: Eugenie Brinkema<http://lit.mit.edu/people/ebrinkema.php>
What is a narrative? What might it be? How does any narrative—whether short or long, literary or cinematic—make us know, understand, and feel, or fail to know, understand, and feel things? In this course, we will examine a wide assortment of narrative forms—epics, novels, tales, short stories (written and sung), films, television programs, graphic novels, and an interactive gamebook—asking why and how stories are formed. Our concerns will include: how narratives organize (or disorganize) knowledge, time, and space; the role of voice and point of view; how different media affect the construction and interpretation of narratives; and what happens when narratives become circular, layered, multiple, reflexive, or interactive. We will also explore what happens when narration is incomplete, when a narrator lies, is repulsive, mad, dead or dying—or, as in the case of Kafka's "A Report to an Academy," an ape.
Films include Citizen Kane, North by Northwest, Pulp Fiction, Run Lola Run, and Memento. We will also look at episodes of The Simpsons, The Sopranos, and the out-of-order sitcom How I Met Your Mother. Readings will include Homer's Odyssey; Grimms' fairy tales; Shelley's Frankenstein; short stories by Poe, Kafka, Bierce, and The Velvet Underground's "The Gift"; Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground; an Edward Packard "Choose Your Own Adventure" gamebook; and Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus.

 21L.021 Comedy
MW 9:30 - 11:00 Hass-H/Hass-D1/CI-H
Instructor: Wyn Kelley<http://lit.mit.edu/people/wkelley.php>
This class considers comedy in drama, narrative, and film spanning more than 2000 years. We will look at examples of Greek, Roman, and Shakespearean drama and the bawdy stories of Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Rabelais; investigate the romantic comedy and social satire of Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde; and try to understand the uneasy relationship between farce and romantic love, violence and redemptive humor, satire and festivity in comic art. We will note certain continuities: the body as object and source of rebellious pleasure; transgression against social norms corrected and reordered through laughter; verbal play and wit; identity and mistaken identity; political protest and social reform. As the class develops, we will also note the ways writers appropriate and reshape comic plots and structures from the past for new uses.

 21L.475 Enlightenment and Modernity: Victorian Modernity
TR 11:00 - 12:30 Hass-H
Instructor: John Picker <http://lit.mit.edu/people/jpicker.php> <http://lit.mit.edu/people/rpittswiley.php>
This survey of English literature and culture from 1837-1901 will consider the tensions of a transitional era that flirted with and feared modernity. Among the subjects we will cover will be those that shaped the modern age: faith and doubt, bodies and machines, new technologies and media, science, sex and gender, empire, the function of art, and degeneration. Readings will consist not only of fiction, drama, and poetry, but also some historical writing, journalism, and criticism; texts will likely include works by Carlyle, Dickens, Ruskin, Tennyson, Darwin, Eliot, Braddon, Wilde, and others. Expectations include diligent preparation and active participation, along with some discussion leading and writing assignments.

21L.512 American Authors: Autobiography and Memoir
MW 1:00 - 2:30 Hass-H
Instructor: Wyn Kelley<http://lit.mit.edu/people/wkelley.php>
What is a "life" when it's written down? How does memory inform the present? Why are autobiographies and memoirs so popular? This course will address these questions and others, considering the relationship between biography, autobiography, and memoir and between personal and social themes. We will examine classic authors such as Benjamin Franklin, Mary Rowlandson, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Mark Twain; then more recent examples like Tobias Wolff, Art Spiegelman, Sherman Alexie, Alison Bechdel, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, or Edwidge Danticat.

 21L.639 Globalization and its Discontents: Spanish-speaking Nations
TR 1:00 - 2:30 Hass-H
Instructor: César Pérez
The course will focus on the two defining features that have shaped 20th and 21st Century Latin American identity and culture: the often conflictive relationship with the United States and the profound influence of the Cuban revolution and its aftermath. Materials will include fiction, essay, poetry, film and music as well as telenovelas, advertisements and blogs so that students will become familiar with popular as well as canonical cultural artifacts. We will identify the forces that made Latin American literature and culture so globally influential from the 1960's to the present. While our discussions will be wide-ranging, the course will emphasize Argentina, Chile, the Caribbean and Mexico.
Course is taught entirely in Spanish. Students should have completed an intermediate course or an advanced course in Spanish or have the permission of the instructor.

 21L.705 Major Authors: Mapping Melville
MW 3:30 - 5:00 Hass-H/CI-M
Instructor: Wyn Kelley<http://lit.mit.edu/people/wkelley.php>
In his life and work, Herman Melville traveled far, from the streets of American cities to the decks of ships in Pacific archipelagos to the tourist sites of London, Rome, Cairo, and Jerusalem. This class will track Melville's journeys in life and literature, using various digital tools including an interactive map developed at MIT. Students will immerse themselves in Melville's novels and poems—Moby-Dick, The Confidence-Man, Battle-Pieces, and Billy Budd among others—in order to experience the sweep of his literary and geographical imagination.

 21L.707 Problems in Cultural Interpretation: Women Reading/Women Writing
TR 3:30 - 5:00 Hass-H/CI-M
Instructor: Ruth Perry<http://lit.mit.edu/people/rperry.php>
When George Eliot published Scenes from Clerical Life, Charles Dickens wrote to her publisher and asked who the author was because he did not believe that the heroines in that work could have been invented by a man.
Do women's books have a discernable style? Do men's? Is theme, or character, or plot or incident in some way "gendered"? If so, does this mean that women cannot create plausible male characters and men cannot create plausible women—that Henry James' Isabel Archer (Portrait of a Lady) and George Eliot's Dr. Lydgate (Middlemarch) reveal the gender of their creators? Or that women are privileged readers of women's texts and men are privileged readers of men's texts, such that no woman can fully understand Anna Karenina and no man Emma? What have critics said on this subject? We will read both fiction and criticism in this class to explore the topic.
21L.709 Studies in Literary History: The 1920s: African-American Literature of the Jazz Age
TR 11:00 - 12:30 Hass-H/CI-M
Instructor: Sandy Alexandre<http://lit.mit.edu/people/salexandre.php>
This seminar will provide an in-depth introduction to the literary, historical, geographical, and cultural phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance (1920-1930). In the first half of the seminar we will read Harlem Renaissance debates about the idea of art and the artist. We will then read many of the texts most often associated with the Harlem Renaissance. These include Jean Toomer's Cane, Nella Larsen's two novellas Quicksand and Passing, James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun, Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, Langston Hughes's The Weary Blues, and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God.


Have a great Weekend!

Thank you
Daria


***********************************************************
Daria Johnson
Undergraduate Academic Administrator
Literature Section
MIT School of Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences
77 Massachusetts Avenue 14N-411
Cambridge, MA 02139
Work Hours : M-F 8:30am-4:30pm
p (617)324-1659
f (617)253-6105

dalesej at mit.edu<mailto:dalesej at mit.edu>

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