Courses tagged with "KIx" (159)

This half-semester Samplings course, worth six instead of the typical twelve credits, drew attention to the thirteen female Nobel laureates. As the MIT Literature website explains, Samplings serve students looking for "a less intensive, more discussion and reading oriented way of continuing literary study." Secondly, "they allow the Literature Faculty to offer occasional subjects that cannot be permanently and regularly offered. Finally, they are a site of experimentation—a way of trying out new authors and new themes."

This course explores the ways in which various American artists view race and class as performed or performable identities. Discussions will focus on some of the following questions: What does it mean to act black, white, privileged, or underprivileged? What do these artists suggest are the implications of performing (indeed playing at or with) racial identity, ethnicity, gender, and class status? How and why are race and class status often conflated in these performances?

Reading Fiction is designed to sharpen your skills as a critical reader. As we explore both short stories and novels focusing on the theme of "the city in literature," we will learn about the various elements that shape the way we read texts - structure, narrative voice, character development, novelistic experimentation, historical and political contexts and reader response.

This course explores the form, content, and historical context of various works of fiction specifically through the thematic lens of "dysfunctional families." We will focus primarily on questions pertaining to the structure, language, story, and characters of these fictional works.

Great works of fiction often take us to far-off places; they sometimes conduct us on journeys toward a deeper understanding of what's right next door. We'll read, discuss, and interpret a range of short and short-ish works: The reading list will be chosen from among such texts as "Gilgamesh," Homer's Odyssey (excerpts), Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (excerpts), Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Saleh's Season of Migration to the North, Woolf's To the Lighthouse, John Cheever's "The Swimmer," Coetzee's The Life and Times of Michael K, Irving's "Rip Van Winkle," Toni Morrison's Jazz, H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Beckett's How It Is, Calvino's Invisible Cities, Forster's A Passage to India. As a CI-H class, this subject will involve substantial practice in argumentative writing and oral communication.

"Reading Poetry" has several aims: primarily, to increase the ways you can become more engaged and curious readers of poetry; to increase your confidence as writers thinking about literary texts; and to provide you with the language for literary description. The course is not designed as a historical survey course but rather as an introductory approach to poetry from various directions – as public or private utterances; as arranged imaginative shapes; and as psychological worlds, for example. One perspective offered is that poetry offers intellectual, moral and linguistic pleasures as well as difficulties to our private lives as readers and to our public lives as writers. Expect to hear and read poems aloud and to memorize lines; the class format will be group discussion, occasional lecture.

The Renaissance has justly become both famous and notorious as an age of discovery, and its voyages took place in many realms. This semester, we will read several history making narratives of early modern travel: first-hand accounts of discovery, captivity, conquest, or cultural encounter. As Europeans came to acquire experience of unfamiliar places, literary texts of the period began to assimilate this experience by describing imagined voyages across real or fantastic landscapes. Finally, voyages of exploration served Renaissance writers as a metaphor: for intellectual inquiry, for spiritual development, or for the pursuit of love. Among the literary genres sampled this semester will be sonnets, plays, prose narratives, utopias, and chivalric romance. Authors and travellers will include Francis Petrarch, Amerigo Vespucci, Thomas More, Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, Hernán Cortés, John Donne, Francis Drake, Mary Rowlandson, Francis Bacon.

This class engages students in a transdisciplinary conversation about representations of HIV/AIDS: in science writing, journalism, visual art, literature, drama, and popular culture. We believe that scientists and cultural critics can learn valuable lessons from one another, even as they create their own responses to HIV/AIDS. Today, over 30 years since the first scientific reports of HIV/AIDS, the pandemic remains a major health concern throughout the world. But, rays of hope have led to speculation that an AIDS-free generation may be possible. In such a timely moment, it is essential for us to connect across the "two cultures" as we consider the social and scientific implications of HIV/AIDS.

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This course examines readings of the major British Romantic poets (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Scott, Shelley, and Keats) and important fiction writers (Mary Shelley and Walter Scott). Attention is also given to literary and historical contexts.

Three hundred and eighty years after his death, William Shakespeare remains the central author of the English-speaking world; he is the most quoted poet and the most regularly produced playwright — and now among the most popular screenwriters as well. Why is that, and who "is" he? Why do so many people think his writing is so great? What meanings did his plays have in his own time, and how do we read, speak, or listen to his words now? What should we watch for when viewing his plays in performance? Whose plays are we watching, anyway? We'll consider these questions as we carefully examine a sampling of Shakespeare's plays from a variety of critical perspectives.

Together with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Professor Jonathan Bate explores Shakespeare, his works and the world he lived in.

Shakespeare’s work has influenced the way we think about our relationships and ourselves. His plays are still as relevant today as when they were written almost 400 years ago.

In this introductory course, you will learn how Shakespeare uses emotion in his plays, how his characters experience and manipulate emotions, and how the emotional resonance of the plays makes them powerfully relevant to the modern world.

As you follow and engage with the emotional journeys of characters in tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, and history; you will discover patterns of plot, action, and speech that will help you appreciate, understand, and discuss Shakespeare’s plays.

Each week of the course will focus on a different emotion. You’ll cover the range of emotions found in Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, The Winter’s Tale, and King Henry V.

This course includes interactive activities, and interviews with a range of people engaged creatively and professionally with Shakespeare’s plays. You’ll be encouraged to interpret Shakespeare in your own way - to find ‘your Shakespeare.’

You will learn how to read a Shakespeare play and gain the tools you need to interpret its language. You will also have the opportunity to experience what it’s like to direct scenes from the plays. And you’ll learn about the various kinds of Shakespearean drama, and the dramatic and poetic techniques Shakespeare uses to investigate the human condition.

This literature and theater course will study two of the most sublime and gut-wrenching plays in the English language: Othello and King Lear. We will try to understand the reasons for their centrality to literary history as well as their continuing power to mesmerize audiences in theatres and cinemas across the world.

As we explore the genius of the plays on the page, we will also study the lives of the plays in performance, from Shakespeare's own theatre to the stages and screens across the globe today. To help us further, actors will occasionally join our effort to demonstrate ways of bringing the text alive as living theatre.

This literature and theater course will delve into two wonderful plays of young love, Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and try to bring alive what makes them so compelling and popular -- as both literature and drama.

As we explore the genius of the plays on the page, we will also study the lives of the plays in performance, from Shakespeare's own theatre to the stages and screens across the globe today. To help us further, actors will occasionally join our effort to demonstrate ways of bringing the text alive as living theatre.

Academics from the Shakespeare Institute introduce aspects of the most famous play ever written - its origins, texts, and history.

Shakespeare wrote for a popular audience and was immensely successful. Shakespeare is also rightly regarded as one of the greatest playwrights the world has known. This course will try to understand both Shakespeare’s popularity and his greatness by starting from a simple premise: that the fullest appreciation of Shakespeare can be achieved only when literary study is combined with analysis of the plays as theatre. Hence, as we delve into the dimensions that make Shakespeare’s plays so extraordinary--from the astonishing power of their language to their uncanny capacity to illuminate so much of human life--we will also explore them in performance from Shakespeare’s own theatre to the modern screen. At the same time, actors will occasionally join our effort and demonstrate ways of bringing the text alive as living theatre. Plays to be studied will include Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, King Lear, and The Winter's Tale.

Image courtesy Castle Rock Entertainment/The Kobal Collection

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Is there a required textbook?
The texts of all six plays will be required. Free, electronic versions can be found on numerous sites on the internet, including the following, which offers pdf downloads: http://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/download.html. However, free, internet editions do not provide glosses or notes that explain difficult words and phrases. We strongly recommend that participants purchase texts (paper or electronic) that provide important aids to reading.

Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt (John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities) guides learners through an exploration of Shakespeare’s unforgettable character Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and his historical origins.

In the first act of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the Jewish moneylender Shylock proposes a “merry sport” to the merchant Antonio: he will lend Antonio the money he needs if Antonio agrees to let Shylock take a pound of his flesh should he default. Shylock calls this contract a “merry bond,” and Shakespeare’s First Folio calls the play a comedy. But what does Shylock want from the bond, and how merry does the play ultimately prove? 

This course introduces learners to Jewish history both in Venice and in England, to the ways in which Shakespeare’s own audience might have responded to the play and its genre, and to the history of the play’s production through the twenty-first century. 

Learners will also be invited to share their own theatrical interpretations of The Merchant of Venice and to ask how the meaning of a work of art may change in different times, contexts, and cultures.

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The "small wonders" to which our course will attend are moments of present time, depicted in the verbal and visual media of the modern age: newspapers, novels and stories, poems, photographs, films, etc. We will move between visual and verbal media across a considerable span of time, from eighteenth-century poetry and prose fiction to twenty-first century social networking and microblogging sites, and from sculpture to photography, film, and digital visual media. With help from philosophers, contemporary cultural historians, and others, we will begin to think about a media practice largely taken for granted in our own moment.

In this 3-unit class, we will read Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost. The goal of the class is for students to come away feeling comfortable with its language and argument; meeting in a small group will also allow us to talk about the key questions and issues raised by the poem. This course is offered during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), which is a special 4-week term at MIT that runs from the first week of January until the end of the month.

Taking as its starting point the works of one of Britain's most respected, prolific—and funny—living dramatists, this seminar will explore a wide range of knowledge in fields such as math, philosophy, politics, history and art. The careful reading and discussion of plays by (Sir) Tom Stoppard and some of his most compelling contemporaries (including Caryl Churchill, Anna Deveare Smith and Howard Barker) will allow us to time-travel and explore other cultures, and to think about the medium of drama as well as one writer's work in depth. Some seminar participants will report on earlier plays that influenced these writers, others will research everything from Lord Byron's poetry to the bridges of Konigsberg, from Dadaism to Charter 77. Employing a variety of critical approaches (both theoretical and theatrical), we will consider what postmodernity means, as applied to these plays. In the process, we will analyze how drama connects with both the culture it represents and that which it addresses in performance. We will also explore the wit and verbal energy of these contemporary dramatists…not to mention, how Fermat's theorem, classical translation, and chaos theory become the stuff of stage comedy.