Courses tagged with "Information Theory" (74)
This course examines cultural performances of Asia, including both traditional and contemporary forms, in a variety of genres. Students will explore the communicative power of performances with attention to the ways performers, media, cultural settings, and audiences interact. The representation of cultural difference is considered and how it is altered through processes of globalization. Performances are viewed live when possible, but the course also relies on video, audio, and online materials as necessary. There are no prerequisites for this course and it is taught in English.
This course is a sequel to 21F.113 Chinese V (Streamlined). It is designed to further help students develop sophisticated conversational, reading and writing skills by combining authentic reading and audio-visual material with their own explorations of Chinese speaking societies, using the human, literary, and electronic resources available at MIT, in the Boston area and on the web. Some special features of Chinese societies, cultures and customs will be introduced. The class consists of readings, discussion, student presentations and network exploration. The course is conducted in Mandarin.
This subject is the second semester of two that form an introduction to modern standard Chinese, commonly called Mandarin. Though not everyone taking this course will be an absolute beginner, the course presupposes only 21F.101/151, the beginning course in the sequence. The purpose of this course is to develop: (a) basic conversational abilities (pronunciation, fundamental grammatical patterns, common vocabulary, and standard usage); (b) basic reading skills (in both the traditional character set and the simplified); (c) an understanding of the way the Chinese writing system is structured, and the ability to copy and write characters; and (d) a sense of what learning a language like Chinese entails, and the sort of learning processes that it involves, so students are able to continue studying effectively on their own.
The main text is J. K. Wheatley's Learning Chinese: A Foundation Course in Mandarin, part II (unpublished, but available online). (Part I of the book forms the basis of 21F.101/151, which is also published on OpenCourseWare.)
Chinese Sequence on OCW
OpenCourseWare now offers a complete sequence of four Chinese language courses, covering beginning to intermediate levels of instruction at MIT. They can be used not just as the basis for taught courses, but also for self-instruction and elementary-to-intermediate review.
The four Chinese subjects provide the following materials: an online textbook in four parts, J. K. Wheatley's Learning Chinese: A Foundation Course in Mandarin; audio files of the main conversational and narrative material in this book; and syllabi and day-by-day schedules for each term.
CHINESE COURSES | COURSE SITES |
---|---|
Chinese I (Spring 2006) | 21F.101/151 |
Chinese II (Spring 2006) | 21F.102/152 |
Chinese III (Fall 2005) | 21F.103 |
Chinese IV (Spring 2006) | 21F.104 |
This course studies representative twentieth and twenty-first-century texts and films from Hispanic America and Spain. Emphasis is on developing strategies for analyzing the genres of the novel, the short story, the poem, the fictional film, and the theatrical script. The novels read this semester are Magali García Ramis's Felices días, Tío Sergio (1986, Puerto Rico) and Javier Cercas's Soldados de Salamina (2001, Spain). We will study Lorca's play "La casa de Bernarda Alba" (1936, Spain), films from Spain, México, and Cuba, poems by Darío (Nicaragua), Machado (Spain), Lorca (Spain), Hernández (Spain), Vallejo (Perú), Cernuda (Spain), and Luis Palés Matos (Puerto Rico), and short stories from México (by an exiled Spanish writer), Chile, Argentina, and Cuba. Thematic emphasis is on the Spanish Civil War, changing attitudes toward gender, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and the history of race in the Americas.
This course is an invitation to German film-making since the end of the Second World War. We investigate how German cinema captured the atmosphere of the immediate post-war years and discuss extensively major works of the "New German Cinema" of the Sixties and Seventies. We also look at examples of East Germany's film production and finally observe the very different roads German cinema has been taking from the 1990's into the present.
This course, along with 21F.108/158 offered in the spring, form the elementary level of the streamlined sequence, which is for students who have some basic conversational skills gained, typically, from growing up in a Chinese speaking environment, but lack a corresponding level of literacy. The focus of the course is on learning standard everyday usage, on reading in both traditional and simplified characters, and on writing.
This interdisciplinary course surveys modern European culture to disclose the alignment of literature, opposition, and revolution. Reaching back to the foundational representations of anarchism in nineteenth-century Europe (Kleist, Conrad) the curriculum extends through the literary and media representations of militant organizations in the 1970s and 80s (Italy's Red Brigade, Germany's Red Army Faction, and the Real Irish Republican Army). In the middle of the term students will have the opportunity to hear a lecture by Margarethe von Trotta, one of the most important filmmakers who has worked on terrorism. The course concludes with a critical examination of the ways that certain segments of European popular media have returned to the "radical chic" that many perceive to have exhausted itself more than two decades ago.
Childhood is a source of fascination in most Western cultures. It is both a major inspiration for artistic creation and a political ideal, which aims at protecting future generations. Which role does it play in French society and in other francophone areas? Why is the French national anthem ("La Marseillaise") addressed to its "children"? This course will study the transformation of childhood since the 18th century and the development of sentimentality within the family. We will examine various representations of childhood in literature (e.g. Pagnol, Proust, Sarraute, Laye, Morgièvre), movies (e.g. Truffaut), and songs (e.g. Brel, Barbara). Course taught in French.