Literature (LIT-SHU)

This course provides an introduction to literary theories and methodologies. We will analyze such different approaches to literary expressions as classical, modern, structuralist, post-structuralist approaches; Marxist, colonial and post-colonial approaches, including feminist and post-human methodologies for different literatures. The course will emphasize the shifts and turns in these approaches. The aim is to acquire knowledge of a variety of literary approaches at work when reading literature and of the relationships between text, author, writing and audience. Pre-requisites: None Fulfillment: Humanities Foundations/Introductory course(18-19: Critical Concepts/Survey).

This course takes as its subject the Belle Époque, that period in the life of France’s pre-World War I Third Republic (1871-1914) associated with extraordinary artistic achievement, as well as the Second Empire (1851-1871) that preceded it. In this course, we will attempt to gain a deeper understanding of the literary works of this era by placing them in the context of the society within which they were produced, France’s Second Empire and Third Republic. Like the United States today, the Third Republic was a polity in which issues of the rights of minorities, freedom of expression, the place of religion in the public sphere, and the proper relationship between democracy and imperialism were subjects of constant debate. Furthermore, like the U.S. but unlike contemporary France, the Third Republic relied much more on the market and less on state subsidies to support artistic endeavors. Among other questions, we will examine to what extent the cultural flowering of this period occurred as a result of, or in spite of, this reliance on market forces. Near the end of the course we will take on the challenge of Proust’s Swann’s Way, which we will read together in its entirety. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Major Other Introductory Courses (18-19 Survey Courses).

Modernism is a 20th-century literary, artistic, intellectual, and theoretical movement. It started in the West from 1890 as a reaction to major socio-cultural, political, intellectual, economic, scientific, and technological developments that left many feeling unsettled, lost, and disillusioned. Modernism and modernist literature also took off in other locations in the world but not necessarily during the same period of 1890 to the 1940s. Furthermore, modernism in the West has arguably witnessed a comeback. This 200-level course covers the rise of modernism as a global phenomenon of thematic, generic, and stylistic experimentation and will draw attention to canonical writers from across the globe such as William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Frantz Kafka, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Lu Xun, and Tayeb Salih. We will also situate literary modernism in relation to nineteenth-century literary realism, the subsequent postmodernism, and, where relevant, postcolonialism. Students will be exposed to different genres: these may include short stories, poems, visual arts, film, plays, novels, and theory; and as needed we will examine how visual culture, architecture, and popular culture interacted with, influenced, and were shaped by, modernist aesthetics. The course will unpack major thematic, generic, and stylistic elements found in modernist literature and artistic and visual forms. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Introductory Course; Humanities Minor.

How can different words say the "same" thing? This course explores the linguistic, aesthetic, cultural, and political implications of moving between languages. We will study key statements of translation theory, compare several versions of a single text, and read fiction that intentionally crosses linguistic boundaries. We'll even try our own hands at this fascinating, frustrating art. Knowledge of a language other than English is not required. Our goal is to learn how thinking about translation can make us more careful readers and writers. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Major introductory course

This course explores the link between writing and imagining a world by studying texts authored by women from varied historical, geographic and cultural contexts. Through the works of Bibi Khanum Astarabadi, Mary Wollstonecraft, Halide Edib Adivar, Phillis Wheatley, and other writers from Iran, Britain, the United States, Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine, and Turkey, the course asks students to consider what agency looks like in feminist writings from around the world. Building connections between seemingly disparate Eastern and Western literary, cultural and philosophical traditions, students will learn to revise the vocabularies and practices of feminism by decentering its Eurocentric configurations. Prerequisite: Global Perspectives on Society (GPS). Fulfillment: Humanities Major Advanced Class (new bulletin); Topics Class (old bulletin).

Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Identity, Gender, and Language: Humanities Advanced course.

To read, write and tell stories is to leave a record of human expression. This course engages with literary works that explore the long human past, asking how modern and contemporary cultures re-wrote and reinterpreted the human experience during the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. This class looks to the global prehistorical imagination through diverse literary, philosophical and cultural works. Focusing in on archaeological discoveries including the first prehistoric cave art recognized at Spain’s Altamira caves in 1879, the first translation and publication of Gilgamesh in 1880, the discovery of the Dunhuang manuscripts in Mogao Cave in 1900, the “Peking Man” of Zhoukoudian in 1921 and the Lascaux caves in 1941, we will read related writings and works from a range of nineteenth and twentieth-century writers, philosophers and intellectuals. Authors may include Charles Darwin, Friedrich Engels, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Virginia Woolf, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Guo Moruo, Zhou Zuoren, Yu Dafu, Jean Baudrillard and others, as well as contemporary scholars of deep time (e.g. Robert MacFarlane). Through close attention to their rhetoric, images and ideals, the course will allow students to identify a range of discourses through which writers and others theorized human modernity and grounded major artistic, political or pseudoscientific projects. Whether understood as mythical, universal, romantic, national or otherwise, the search for humanity’s prehistories was inextricably tied to an evolution of modern imaginaries, fictions and desires. Prerequisite: GPS. Fulfillment: Humanities Major Advanced Course.

Midsummer Night’s Dream The Merchant of Venice The Tempest “Comedies, Histories, Tragedies”—these categories originate with the First Folio of 1623. They are, arguably, not those of Shakespeare, who had been dead for seven years when Heminges and Condell, two actors in the playwright’s company, put the volume together. On the evidence of the plays themselves the scheme is far too rigid. For example, The Merchant of Venice is billed as a comedy, but its humor is of the darkest and most troubling kind. The court impresario in A Midsummer Night’s Dream introduces the play within the play (a hilarious farce in which two characters die) as promising “very tragical mirth.” Titus Andronicus is a tragedy; yet at the moment of his most profound suffering, Titus bursts into laughter. His brother asks, “Why dost thou laugh? it fits not with this hour,” to which Shakespeare’s tragic hero replies: “Why, I have not another tear to shed.” Through close reading, with attention to their historical and critical context, and by means of film adaptations of the plays, these two courses will explore the “fit” between laughter and tears in Shakespearean theater. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities 18-19 Topic course.

Titus Andronicus The First Part of King Henry the Fourth Anthony and Cleopater “Comedies, Histories, Tragedies”—these categories originate with the First Folio of 1623. They are, arguably, not those of Shakespeare, who had been dead for seven years when Heminges and Condell, two actors in the playwright’s company, put the volume together. On the evidence of the plays themselves the scheme is far too rigid. For example, The Merchant of Venice is billed as a comedy, but its humor is of the darkest and most troubling kind. The court impresario in A Midsummer Night’s Dream introduces the play within the play (a hilarious farce in which two characters die) as promising “very tragical mirth.” Titus Andronicus is a tragedy; yet at the moment of his most profound suffering, Titus bursts into laughter. His brother asks, “Why dost thou laugh? it fits not with this hour,” to which Shakespeare’s tragic hero replies: “Why, I have not another tear to shed.” Through close reading, with attention to their historical and critical context, and by means of film adaptations of the plays, these two courses will explore the “fit” between laughter and tears in Shakespearean theater. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities 18-19 Topic course.

Magic realism is a term that was originally coined by Franz Roh in 1925 to describe Post-expressionist visual art in Europe; however, since that time it has become synonymous with a literary genre in which marvelous elements touch and merge into an otherwise normal reality. Traditionally this genre has been associated with Latin American literature and writers, most famously Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges. Yet, the global spread of this genre indicates that it is not exclusively the creative voice of a post-colonial mind, seeking to reconcile its new present with the traditions (and often superstitions) of a colonial and pre-colonial past. Today, the political criteria for inclusion in the genre is as subject to question, as are the very terms post-colonial and post-modern and their allocation. As the magic realist novel is taken up by author’s whose cultural history would seem to exclude them from this category, it has revealed its import in the critical landscape as a form with a “capacity to link many different literatures” (206). In this class we will be reading several magic realist novels and short stories from authors born in different countries, including Columbia, India, and the USA as we build up to a consideration of the genre as found in modern Chinese literature. We will examine how each of these authors uses the magic realist voice to speak to his or her cultural history, national future and personal sense of identity. Since classes will involve analyzing the texts from a variety of theoretical stances, and discussing our responses to their ideas and content, students should be prepared to keep up with the reading and contribute in class. Works Cited: De La Campa, Roman. “Magic Realism and World Literature: A Genre for the Times?” Revista Canadiense di Estudios Hispanicos. 23:2 (Invierno 1999): 205-19. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: CORE HPC.

The substantive goal of Global Shakespeare will be to assess the influence—by way of translation, performance and criticism as an index to more general forms of cultural adaptation and appropriation—of “Shakespeare” as a global phenomenon. The scare quotes are meant to designate the Bard and his works, in the first instance as the product of the English Renaissance, but beyond that as a fund of “cultural capital” with its own global investment that continues to pay dividends after four centuries. More than any other “western” literary figure, Shakespeare has served as the metric by which subsequent ages have calibrated their own relationship to the dominant (artistic and national) culture he has come to represent. Thus we have the Shakespeare translation by Schlegel and Tieck, a classic of German romanticism; the Japanese Shakespeare of Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (the film that repositions Macbeth somewhere between feudal- and post-Hiroshima Japan, with stylistic elements drawn from Noh drama); the post-colonial Une Tempete of the contemporary Afro-Caribbean writer Aimé Césaire; and a hip-hop Romeo and Juliet directed by Tian Qinxin. This last raises one question we will want to address, insofar the director claims that even though everything else has changed, not least the language, the spirit of Shakespeare has been preserved. What is this “spirit” that seems both to guarantee that whatever changes are wrought, some essential core remains that allows the director to claim that it’s still Shakespeare? This disembodied spirit- “Shakespeare” seem capable of moving effortlessly through time and space, coming to rest in ever-new habitations but always under the same name. One way to think about the director’s claim is to ask what the word (translated as “spirit”) actually means to her in Chinese. This question focuses in turn on the pedagogical goal of the course. In addition to tackling the plays on the syllabus in English, the students will be asked to read the plays, alongside the English text, in whatever other language they possess—“Shakespeare” speaks Chinese, obviously, but also French, Spanish, Dutch, and even Hindi and Hungarian, among the many languages into which the plays have been translated. This side-by-side reading should go a long way toward alleviating the anxiety that ESL readers bring to Shakespeare, while at the same time offering a valuable tool for analysis at the micro-level. What are the nuances of “to be or not to be” when it becomes “Sein oder Nichtsein” (the verbs transformed into nouns)? Attention to small details may well lead to a wider perception of cultural difference. Students might be asked, as their research project, to investigate the significance of “Shakespeare” in their own country (on the model, but hardly to extent, of Alexander Huang’s Chinese Shgakespeares). Foregrounding and at the same time alleviating the problem of language is one way of making for a more user-friendly Shakespeare. Another is to include international productions of the plays on film. A good resource for this is to be found at HTTP://GLOBALSHAKESPEARES.MIT.EDU. Furthermore, in order to allow for a careful reading of the plays, the list will be limited (as I see it now) to: Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear, and The Tempest. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities 18-19 Topic course.

This course, the first segment in a two-semester survey of Chinese-language film history, traces the origins of Chinese cinema and its transformation and diversification into a multi-faceted, polycentric trans-regional phenomenon in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan up to the 1960s. We study a number of film cultures in Shanghai/China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, including the complex web of their historical kinship ties, and place them within the regional and global contexts of modernity, revolution, nation-building, and attendant socio-cultural transformations. To investigate these unique yet interrelated films cultures together raises the question of national cinema as a unitary object of study, while suggesting new avenues for analyzing the complex genealogy of a cluster of urban, regional, commercial or state-sponsored film industries within a larger comparative and transnational framework. Topics related to screenings and discussions include urban modernity, exhibition and spectatorship, transition to sound, stardom and propaganda, gender and ethnic identities, and genre formation and hybridization. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: CORE HPC or IPC; GCS Chinese Media, Arts, and Literature.

The course—which might otherwise be called science and the imagination, or the imagination of science—has a center and a periphery. At its core, the “scientific revolution,” extends roughly from the 1540’s (the decade of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium) to the 1680’s (the decade of Newton’s Principia). This is the narrative that describes the movement of what Donne calls, with much trepidation, the “new philosophy, the shift from the Ptolemaic view of a geocentric world to our modern understanding of the solar system. A central document in that history and on our list is Galileo’s Starry Messenger of 1610. But the same period also witnesses advances in mathematics (including the invention of perspective), physiology and anatomy (including the influential work of Vesalius), urban planning (the rationalized “ideal city”) and much more—all underpinned by a neo-skeptical turn in philosophy revealing deeper shifts in the concept of knowledge and of the empirical methods by which it is to be produced. Thus the works in the history of science by Kuhn, Shapin, and Popkin. Taking in this broader view, we will be interested in Bacon’s The New Atlantis, which we will read both as a document in the history of the scientific method and, like the Utopia of Thomas More (which Bacon has at hand as he writes), and as a new kind of utopian fiction—“science fiction”—that we will follow into the works of Neville, Godwin, Wilkins, Cavendish, and Shakespeare. We will read Machiavelli’s The Prince as an inaugural document in what has come to be called political science, and a document entailing a revisionary account of history, fortune, and human agency. We will begin and end with Donne, including along with his “Songs and Sonnets” a careful reading of the “First Anniversary,” an “Anatomy of the World” which expands its meditation on the death of its nominal subject (the deceased 14-year-old daughter of a would-be patron) to consider the death of the world order as it was known, and the advent of a new world with “all coherence gone.” Referencing the following books: Thomas More, Utopia (Norton Critical ed., edited R.M Adams) Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (Norton Critical ed., edited R.M. Adams) Three Early Modern Utopias: Thomas More: Utopia / Francis Bacon: New Atlantis / Henry Neville: The Isle of Pines (Oxford World's Classics, ed. Susan Bruce Francis Godwin, The Man in the Moone (Broadview, ed. Poole) Shakespeare The Tempest (Norton Critical ed.) Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader (Broadview, ed. Bowerabank and Mendelson Thomas S.Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (Harvard) Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago) Richard Popkin, The History of Skepticism: From Erasmus to Spinoza (California) John Donne, Complete English Poems (Penguin, ed. Smith) Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the two Chief World Systems (Modern Library paperback) John Wilkins, Discovery of a World in the Moon Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: CORE STS; Humanities 18-19 Topic.

This course introduces students to gender, sexuality and feminism in African literatures. It examines literary expressions of women’s social, economic and spiritual experiences in both local and transnational contexts in Africa. Through close readings and literary analyses of a geographically and linguistically diverse selection of established and emergent African fiction, students comparatively analyze literary examples of women’s experiences. These experiences are read in light of theoretical concepts on feminism and gender in Africa to understand the intersection of women’s experiences with such broader historical and geographical phenomena as imperialism or colonialism and postcolonialism, transnationalism and globalization. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Advanced course (18-19: Survey).

The European Middle Ages remains a common subject in popular culture, often as a setting for fantasy, romance, Arthuriana, warfare, and adventure. This fascination endures, in large part, because the period in question captures our imaginations with its mythical creatures, legends of chivalry, codes of honor, and damsels in distress. But at the heart of this reimagined world that has become so central to a collective cultural consciousness are the literature and events that inspired it. In medieval literature we find much more than dragons, manticores, King Arthur and his knights: we find the foundations for love, sexual relations, marriage, as well as the seeds of bias, exclusion, and persecution that endure into the twenty-first century. And while the Middle Ages did not invent these concepts, we can clearly trace a direct line back from the present to the shape they took during the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries in the medieval West. This course begins with troubadour poetry as the foundation of ‘courtly love,’ a literary topos that continues to be proliferated in television, film, novels, and popular song. It examines the troubadours’ role in shaping and gendering sexual desire, passion, and fin amor. We then turn to chivalric romance, where the concept of courtly love flourished in the adulterous adventures of knights and ladies–for true love and passion could only exist outside of marriage. In the second half of the course, we turn to another vestige of the medieval past by examining what the scholar Robert I. Moore has called “the formation of a persecuting society.” We will look at how the Third and Fourth Lateran Councils sought to marginalize Jews, Muslims, and lepers, among others. We will read crusade chronicles, memoirs, and poetry that reflect and contribute to the growing culture of categorization and exclusion that emerged. Through class discussions and in-class activities, we will explore the connections between contemporary expressions of love and hate with their medieval origins. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Introductory course (18-19: Topics)

This course provides an advanced understanding of Muslim women’s experiences in a transnational and global network of societies and politics. We will examine Muslim women’s relationship with Islam—Islamic practice, habits, rituals, culture and customs— in postcolonial fiction. Within a broad regional and thematic foci we will emphasize the transnational nature of Muslim women’s engagement with Islam as protagonists in this fiction travel outside their homelands and reside in diasporic communities. We will examine their negotiations of a variety of situations in foreign cultures with their personal faith; aspects of the foreign culture they are able to reconcile with and ones they find difficult to adapt to, among other questions that help us understand Muslim women’s spiritual experiences transnationally. Prerequisite: Global Perspectives on Society (GPS) Fulfillment: Humanities Advanced course (18-19 Critical Concepts/Topic).

This course examines the historical and poetic dimensions of nineteenth-century British imperialism with a focus on the literature of the romantic period. As we explore the connections and tensions between imperialist politics and romantic aesthetics, we will follow three paths of inquiry: 1) how did empire inform the cultural and literary perspectives of the time, 2) what were the historical models and lineages empire was associated with both in political and literary discourses of the period, 3) what definitions empire and imperialism gained in romantic imagination, and how do they inflect the notions and concepts regarded quintessentially romantic such as the sublime? We will seek answers to these questions by returning to the landscape of the romantic period in a comprehensive and inclusive way, reading the works of marginalized authors alongside their rather widely studied contemporaries. Prerequisite: GPS Fulfillment: Humanities Advanced Course.