Courses tagged with "Nutrition" (104)

It is easy to think of love as a "universal language" - but do ideas about love translate easily across history, culture, and identity? In this course, we will encounter some surprising, even disturbing ideas about love and sex from medieval writers and characters: For instance, that married people can never be in love, that the most satisfying romantic love incorporates pain and violence, and that intense erotic pleasure can be found in celibate service to God. Through Arthurian romances, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, love letters, mystical visions, and more, we will explore medieval attitudes toward marriage, sexuality, and gender roles. What can these perspectives teach us about the uniqueness of the Middle Ages—and how do medieval ideas about love continue to influence the beliefs and fantasies of our own culture?

This survey provides a general introduction to medieval European literature (from Late Antiquity to the Fifteenth Century) from the perspective of women writers from a variety of cultures, social backgrounds, and historical timeperiods. Though much of the class will be devoted to exploring the evolution of a new literary tradition by and for women from its earliest emergence in the West, wider historical and cultural movements will also be addressed: the Fall of the Roman Empire, the growth of religious communities, the shift from orality to literacy, the culture of chivalry and courtly love, the emergence of scholasticism and universities, changes in devotional practices, the persecution of heretics, the rise of nationalism and class consciousness. Authors will include some of the most famous women of the period: Hildegard of Bingen, Heloise of Paris, Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, Joan of Arc, Margery Kempe, along with many interesting and intriguing though lesser known figures.

This course considers some of the substantial early twentieth-century poetic voices in America. Authors vary, but may include Moore, Frost, Eliot, Stevens, and Pound.

We'll read the major poems by the most important poets in English in the 20th century, emphazinig especially the period between post-WWI disillusionment and early WW II internationalism (ca. 1918-1940). Our special focus this term will be how the concept of "the Image" evolved during this period. The War had undercut beliefs in master-narratives of nationalism and empire, and the language-systems that supported them (religious transcendence, rationalism and formalism). Retrieving energies from the Symbolist movements of the preceding century, early 20th century poets began to rethink how images carry information, and in what ways the visual, visionary, and verbal image can take the place of transcendent beliefs. New theories of linguistics and anthropology helped to advance this interest in the artistic/religious image. So did Freud. So did Charlie Chaplin films.

We'll read poems that pay attention both to this disillusionment and to the compensatory joyous attention to the image: to ideas of the poet-as-language-priest, aesthetic-experience-as-displaced-religious impulse, to poetry as faith, ritual, and form.

In this course, we will investigate popular culture and narrative by focusing on the relationship between literary texts and comics. Several questions shape the syllabus and provide a framework for approaching the course materials: How do familiar aspects of comics trace their origins to literary texts and broader cultural concerns? How have classic comics gone on to influence literary fiction? In what ways do contemporary graphic narratives bring a new kind of seriousness of purpose to comics, blurring what's left of the boundaries between the highbrow and the lowbrow? Readings and materials for the course range from the nineteenth century to the present, and include novels, short stories, essays, older and newer comics, and some older and newer films. Expectations include diligent reading, active participation, occasional discussion leading, and two papers.

This course provides the opportunity for students-as readers, viewers, writers and speakers-to engage with social and ethical issues they care deeply about. Over the course of the semester, through discussing the writing of classic and contemporary authors, we will explore different perspectives on a range of social issues such as free speech, poverty and homelessness, mental illness, capital punishment and racial and gender inequality. In addition, we will analyze selected documentary and feature films and photographs that represent or dramatize social problems or issues. In assigned essays, students will have the opportunity to write about social and ethical issues of their own choice. This course aims to help students to grow significantly in their ability to understand and grapple with arguments, to integrate secondary print and visual sources and to craft well-reasoned and elegant essays. Students will also keep a reading journal and give oral presentations. In class we will discuss assigned texts, explore strategies for successful academic writing, freewrite and respond to one another's essays.

This is a course focused on the literary genre of the essay, that wide-ranging, elastic, and currently very popular form that attracts not only nonfiction writers but also fiction writers, poets, scientists, physicians, and others to write in the form, and readers of every stripe to read it. Some say we are living in era in which the essay is enjoying a renaissance; certainly essays, both short and long, are at present easier to get published than are short stories or novels, and essays are featured regularly and prominently in the mainstream press (both magazines and newspapers) and on the New York Times bestseller books list. But the essay has a history, too, a long one, which goes back at least to the sixteenth-century French writer Montaigne, generally considered the progenitor of the form. It will be our task, and I hope our pleasure, to investigate the possibilities of the essay together this semester, both by reading and by writing.

This course is an examination of the formal structural and textual variety in poetry. Students engage in extensive practice in the making of poems and the analysis of both students' manuscripts and 20th-century poetry. The course attempts to make relevant the traditional elements of poetry and their contemporary alternatives. There are weekly writing assignments, including some exercises in prosody.

MIT students bring rich cultural backgrounds to their college experience. This course explores the splits, costs, confusions, insights, and opportunities of living in two traditions, perhaps without feeling completely at home in either. Course readings include accounts of growing up Asian-American, Hispanic, Native American, and South-East Asian-American, and of mixed race. The texts include selections from Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Kesaya E. Noda's "Growing Up Asian in America," Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek, Gary Soto's "Like Mexicans," Sherman Alexie's The Toughest Indian in the World, Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, the movies Smoke Signals and Mississippi Masala, Danzy Senna's Caucasia, and others. We will also use students' writings as ways to investigate our multiple identities, exploring the constraints and contributions of cultural and ethnic traditions. Students need not carry two passports in order to enroll; an interest in reading and writing about being shaped by multiple influences suffices.

This course is a workshop for students with some experience in writing essays, nonfiction prose. Our focus will be negotiating and representing identities grounded in gender, race, class, nationality, sexuality, and other categories of identity, either our own or others', in prose that is expository, exploratory, investigative, persuasive, lyrical, or incantatory. We will read nonfiction prose works by a wide array of writers who have used language to negotiate and represent aspects of identity and the ways the different determinants of identity intersect, compete, and cooperate.

Effective writing skills are important for you to succeed in your studies at the collegiate level, as well as for your future career. This course is designed to improve your writing ability, which is necessary for entrance into English Composition 1, as well as for your ongoing success in other academic subjects. Pre-College English coursework focuses on active reading and analytic writing, with emphasis on organization, unity, coherence, and adequate development; an introduction to the expository essay; and a review of the rules and conventions of standard written English. In Unit 1, you will learn the basics of active reading and how active reading is paramount in your success as a student and beyond. You will also learn how to identify the main idea in a piece of literature, and how to create a topic sentence that conveys the main idea in your own writing. You will discover the benefits of prewriting, and will learn prewriting techniques that can be used at the onset of any writing project. In Unit 2, you…

This course will introduce you to the history and practice of English as a scholarly discipline with the goal of preparing you for your future endeavors as an English major. It has been designed to familiarize you with the various tools that scholars have devised in order to facilitate the study of literary expression in English, from critical frameworks to close reading techniques. After an introductory unit outlining basic approaches to literary analysis, we will embark upon a genre study, devoting each of the four remaining units to a different genre of writing: poetry, the novel, drama, the rhetorical essay, and the critical essay. In each of these units, we will review a general history of the genre, read a representative sample or set of samples, learn genre-specific critical terms and theories, and apply what you have learned to essays of your own. By the end of this course, you will have developed strategies that will enable you to understand, analyze, and critically respond to works in any genre at a…

The medieval period, or the Middle Ages, spans about a thousand years between the fall of the Roman Empire, which occurred around 500 CE, and the beginning of the European Renaissance, which was a bit later in England around 1500 CE. The idea of a period called the Middle Ages was a product of later thinkers who contrasted the explosive creativity and cultural transformation of the Renaissance with the seemingly subdued work of earlier centuries. Many saw this earlier period as less intellectually and culturally valuable. It is worth noting that contemporary historians often refer to the Renaissance as the Early Modern. The ideas, values, and tastes of this period are more in alignment with our own, and it is easy to appreciate and identify with them more than with those of earlier times. Nonetheless, the Middle Ages produced artistic works that not only reveal the culture and thought of that age, but also link strongly with artistic representations from later ages, including our own. Many fundamental ideas…

At the outset of the 16th century, Europeans tended to dismiss English literature as inferior to continental literary traditions; the educated Englishman was obliged to travel to the continent and speak in other languages in order to “culture” himself.  By the end of the Renaissance, however, some of the greatest works in the English languagefrom Shakespeare’s dramas to Thomas More’s Utopiahad been written.  In this course, we will read and examine these works, situating them within their socio-historical and literary contexts, while attempting to determine how the art of English language and letters came into its own during this dynamic period. We will begin with an overview of European history during the centuries leading up to the Renaissance in order to acquaint ourselves with the profound cultural and social changes brought about by the Italian Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, nationalism/colonialism, and the growing power of the middle class.  We will then embark upon a genre study,…

Scholars tend to label the period between the Renaissance and the modern era as the long 18th and 19th centuries, meaning that they span from around 1680 - 1830 and 1775 - 1910, respectively, and that so many literary movements and cultural changes took place during these interim years that a narrower title is difficult to come by. In this course, we will examine these formative cultural and literary developments chronologically, dividing the course into four roughly sequential periods: The Enlightenment and Restoration Literature; The Rise of the Novel; Romanticism; and the Victorian Period. We will identify and contextualize the principal characteristics of each of these movements/periods, reading representative texts and examining their relationship to those texts that preceded or were contemporaneous with them. As such, this course foregrounds the movement, the changes, and the continuities from the neoclassicism of authors such as John Dryden and Alexander Pope through the emergence of the novel in th…

From Friedrich Nietzsche’s shocking pronouncement in the late 1800s that “God is dead” and that “we have killed him” to Vladimir Nabokov’s convention-challenging fiction, the Modern periodspanning roughly the end of the 19th century to the presentoffered a range of provocative and often cynical cultural and literary productions.  In this course, we will work to develop a more nuanced understanding of the scope of cultural and literary expression in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries and a working definition of what the vacuous-sounding term “modernism” might mean.  We will attend to broad socio-historical happenings, from the birth of modernism in the late 19th century to the radical violence of the World Wars and the tragedy of the Holocaust and arrive at the post-modern moment, our post-colonial and technologically and economically globalized village.  While offering this historical context, the course focuses on the cultural and literary movements from the “art for…

This course will introduce you to the field of literary theory, a central component of contemporary studies in English and world literature. As you progress through this course, you will gain knowledge of the various premises and methods available to you as a critical reader of literature. You will identify and engage with key questions that have animated - and continue to animate - theoretical discussions among literary scholars and critics, including issues pertaining to ideology, cultural value, the patriarchal and colonial biases of Western culture and literature, and more. The structure of this course is historically based, arranged as a genealogy of theoretical paradigms, beginning in the early 20th century - when literary theory first developed as a formal discipline - and following the evolution of literary theory into the present day. From text-centric Russian formalism to contemporary gynocriticism and trauma theory, you will explore the basic principles and preeminent texts that have defined many o…

Many consider William Shakespeare the greatest dramatisteven the greatest writerof all time.  His impact on Western culture and language is unmistakable, but his works have also been continuously read and performed around the world, illustrating his global significance.  Over the course of this semester, we will attempt to determine why his works have become so widely revered, or why they seem, to quote Ben Jonson, “not for an age, but for all time.” We will begin by familiarizing ourselves with Elizabethan theatre, language, and culturethe world in which Shakespeare lived and breathed.  We will then conduct close readings of a number of Shakespeare’s most acclaimed plays, progressing through his dramatic works by categorizing them in three groups: comedies, tragedies, and histories.  Finally, we will turn to some of his poetry, which Shakespeare (perhaps surprisingly) considered superior to his plays.  By the end of this course, you will have developed a strong understanding of Shakespeare’s w…

In this course, we will study the poetry of John Milton, focusing not only on the texts themselves, but also on the various contexts that are relevant to Milton’s oeuvre, from the tumultuous political and religious period in which Milton lived to the literary network with which his texts interact. We will also take a close look at the man behind Paradise Lost, a man who brazenly announced, relatively early in his poetic career, that he would pen a great epic in the classical tradition. Who was John Milton, and how did he manage to accomplish this goal? Though Milton has gone in and out of literary favor since his death in 1674 (Romantic poets greatly valued his formal techniques as well as his figuration of Hell, while Modernists like T.S. Eliot scowled at his bookish, Puritan austerity), there is no question that Milton’s works shaped the face and the future of English poetry, as well as contemporary books, film, and culture. By the end of this course, you will possess a comprehensive understanding of Mi…

What makes a novel “Gothic”?  Scholars have debated this question for decades: some consider “the Gothic” a literary time period, spanning from the 1760s to 1820; others view it as a set of thematic concerns; still others understand it as a literary mode, in which contemporary authors like Stephen King continue to write.  In this course, you will explore these and other definitions as you read a number of novels (and have the option to screen a film), attempting to define for yourself the term “Gothic.”  You will supplement your studies with critical literature on the Gothic novel and literary mode, critiquing and adapting the approaches and theories as you see fit. You will begin the course with an overview of approaches to the literary Gothic and an outline of its stereotypical characteristics and elements.  You will then progress through the course by examining Gothic novels (and an optional film) in three thematic categories (which, as you will see, often overlap): Gothic Spaces, the Monst…

The Romantic Period in England spans the decades of the 1780’s through the 1830’s. It was the age of revolutions - a span of time that saw not only the rapid industrialization of Europe but two significant national revolutions - one in France and one in America. This revolutionary spirit in many ways fed and sustained the Romantic Movement in English literature; its chief practitioners believed that poetry could literally transform the world and the way in which we understand it. In this course, we will examine this revolutionary energy alongside a number of other English Romantic characteristics, including a fascination with nature and the natural world; a desire to boldly experiment, explore, and renew literature; and a focus on the individual’s capacity for imagination and vision. First, we will discuss the broader socio-historical and literary context in which English Romantic poetry thrived. Second, we will examine the three main concerns of English Romantic poets, which have been roughly divided a…