[bioundgrd] FW: 21L Subjects with Open Seats!

[Joshua Stone]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Jessica TranVo <tranvoj at mit.edu<mailto:tranvoj at mit.edu>>
Subject: 21L Subjects with Open Seats!
Date: September 8, 2022 at 10:40:09 AM EDT


I’m sending this one behalf of Daria Johnson, Undergraduate Academic Administrator of the Literature Section.

Would you please help us spread the info to your students in your DLCs about these awesome/new subjects that have almost no students? We’re really excited about these new subjects but need and appreciate your help in getting the word out!

Please forward and thank you so much.

-

[cid:image001.png at 01D8C370.C6453F10]
(Image order: 21L.512, 21L.704, 21L.720, 21L.638J, 21L.705)

Dear Students,

These 21L Fall 2022 subjects have seats available!

(In numerical order):
21L.512 American Authors: Race, Environment, and Modern American Fiction
TR 9:30-11:00a // 56-167
Taught by Benjamin Mangrum
(Prereq: One subject in Literature, permission of instructor. 3-0-9 HASS-H) This course considers how literary representations of the environment intersect with American ideas about race and national identity. We’ll ask: What does it mean to be “American”? Who belongs in the nation’s cities, deserts, farms, towns, and forests? And how does the literary representation of the environment reflect ideas about belonging? To explore these questions, we’ll consider the work of writers such as Ann Petry, Willa Cather, Hisaye Yamamoto, and William Faulkner, among others. We’ll draw on insights from critical theories of race and the environmental humanities to examine how modern literary movements represent place and identity.

21L.638J/21G.738[J] Literature and Social Conflict: Perspectives on the Hispanic World
MW 1:00-2:30p // 66-148
Taught by Joaquín Terrones
(Prereq: One intermediate subject in Spanish or permission of instructor. 3-0-9 HASS-H) This course examines some of the most important conflicts and social justice issues in the Spanish-speaking world through fiction, poetry, essays, film and popular culture. We will study the Mexican and Cuban Revolutions; the military dictatorships in South America; contemporary struggles for black and indigenous rights; and feminist and LGBT movements across the region. Offered in Spanish.

21L.704 Studies in Poetry: Poetic Life Writing: Apologia, Confession, Concealment
TR 3:30-5:00p // 4-144
Taught by Noel Jackson
(Prereq: Two subjects in Literature. 3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-M) What motivates a poet to set down his or her life story in verse, and how does one do so? To what extent does the aim to tell the authentic truth about an individual life come into conflict with time-honored aims of poetry, upending traditional expectations of formal regularity and decorum? The poets we will read wrote frankly about a range of personal topics not typically regarded as the stuff of poetry in their time. More broadly, they wrote with a sense that one of poetry’s highest attainments is the accurate recording of subjective experience and inward states of mind.
The course subtitle (“Apologia, Confession, Concealment”) names three possible, by no means comprehensive or mutually exclusive, modalities of self-representation in poetic life writing. Our reading will be organized around the study of two literary-historical periods each known for their innovative turn to the autobiographical mode and the precise delineation of inner life: British Romanticism (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron) and the second half of the twentieth century, with the American poets typically labeled “confessional” foremost (Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, John Berryman), as well as others (Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg).

21L.705 Major Authors: Charles Dickens: Early, Middle, and Late
TR 1:00-2:30p // 2-103
Taught by James Buzard
(Prereq: Two subjects in Literature. 3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-M) If Charles Dickens had given us nothing more than Ebenezer Scrooge and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, we would probably still be reading him.  And he gave us much, much more. Nicknamed in his time “the Inimitable,” Dickens produced a large body of work incomparably rich and strange. This class will study three and a half of Dickens’s major novels, taking our time to sink into their immersive worlds of plentiful characters, multiple plots, unexpected connections, zany humor, and searing pathos.
First we will read Pickwick Papers, that miracle of comic improvisation that launched his career and made Dickens a household name. For the middle of his career we’ll examine Bleak House, Dickens’s true masterpiece, a bold and capacious work taking in the whole of his society from high to low. We’ll also read A Tale of Two Cities, his famous historical novel set during the French Revolution. (If you read it in high school, go deeper with it in this class.).Finally, we’ll consider the supremely weird half-novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, on which Dickens was working when he died. Exactly six of twelve planned installments of this final work exist, and readers since 1870 have speculated on how it was all supposed to turn out. Students will be asked to give one or two brief oral reports, to write short response papers on a regular basis, and, as a final project, to complete either a sustained critical essay or a final creative project.
21L.720 Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
MW 9:30-11:00a // 56-167
Taught by Arthur Bahr
(Prereq: Two subjects in Literature. 3-0-9 H, CI-M) In this course we will read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a narrative and poetic collection that is variously bawdy, pious, moving, disturbing, and hilarious. We will read about drunken millers, man-hungry serial monogamists, glad-handing social climbers, bitter provincial bureaucrats, hypocritical members of the ecclesiastical vice squad, and cooks with disturbingly lax standards of personal hygiene (among others). These pilgrims will in turn tell stories of star-crossed love in ancient Athens; why crows are black and can no longer speak; the best way for nerdy students to find love and sex; what one thing all mortal women most desire; and whether you can kill Death without dying yourself (among others). No background in medieval literature or Middle English is expected; enthusiasm for challenging but rewarding material is, and will be repaid with interest.



Thank you!!

Jessica TranVo | She/Her
Publicity & Outreach Coordinator
Literature Section @ MIT
(617) 258-5629
Twitter @LitatMIT
lit.mit.edu<http://lit.mit.edu/>

Schedule
On-site: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday
Remote: Tuesday & Friday





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