American Egyptomania
This website is devoted to exploring American fascination with Egypt and its history. Primary Source documents can be found by browsing the Historical Sources page or by searching through the advanced search page. Secondary literature that addresses topics such as art & architecture, history, literature, religion, and science can be browsed through the scholarship page. The web resources page contains a list of helpful websites related to the topics of the site and the search page is an advanced
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21H.223 War & American Society (MIT)
Writing in the wake of the Civil War, poet Walt Whitman insisted that "the real war will never get in the books." Throughout American history, the experience of war has fundamentally shaped the ways that Americans think about themselves, their fellow Americans, and the meanings of national citizenship. War has also posed challenges of representation, both for those who fought as well as those who did not. This subject examines how Americans have told the stories of modern war in history, literat
Author(s): Capozzola, Christopher

21L.485 20th-Century Fiction (MIT)
Tradition and innovation in representative fiction of the early modern period. Recurring themes: the role of the artist in the modern period, the representation of psychological and sexual experience, the virtues (and defects) of the aggressively experimental character of so many modern books. Works by such writers as Conrad, Kipling, Isaac Babel, Kafka, James, Lawrence, Mann, Ford Madox Ford, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Nabokov.
Author(s): Thorburn, David

21L.501 The American Novel (MIT)
The theme for this class is "American Revolution." We will read authors who record, on the one hand, the failures of the American revolution, with its dream of democracy and freedom for all, and on the other hand the potential for narrative to reenact that revolution successfully. In different ways, these authors overturn traditional or unethical authority through their literary innovations. Although certain classic American historical, political, and cultural issues will be at the center of our
Author(s): Kelley, Wyn

21L.006 American Literature (MIT)
This is a HASS-D CI course. Like other communications-intensive courses in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, it allows students to produce 20 pages of polished writing with careful attention to revision. It also offers substantial opportunities for oral expression, through presentations of written work, student-led discussion, and class participation. The class has a low enrollment that ensures maximum attention to student writing and opportunity for oral expression, and a writing
Author(s): Kelley, Wyn

21L.470 Eighteenth-Century Literature: Versions of the Self in 18th-C Britain (MIT)
When John Locke declared (in the 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding) that knowledge was derived solely from experience, he raised the possibility that human understanding and identity were not the products of God's will or of immutable laws of nature so much as of one's personal history and background. If on the one hand Locke's theory led some to pronounce that individuals could determine the course of their own lives, however, the idea that we are the products of our experience just as
Author(s): Jackson, Noel

21H.105 American Classics (MIT)
"What then is the American, this new man?" asked J. Hector St-John de Crèvecoeur in his Letters from an American Farmer in 1782. This subject takes Crèvecoeur's question as the starting point for an examination of the changing meanings of national identity in the American past. We will consider a diverse collection of classic texts in American history to see how Americans have defined themselves and their nation in politics, literature, art, and popular culture. As a communications
Author(s): Capozzola, Christopher,Lepera, Louise Harrison

4.651 20th Century Art (MIT)
Critical examination of major developments in European and American art during the past century. Surveys art's engagements with modernization, radical politics, utopianism, mass culture, changing conceptions of mind and human nature, new technologies, colonialism and postcolonialism, and other significant aspects of recent history.
Author(s): Jones, Caroline

21H.615 The Middle East in 20th Century (MIT)
This course explores the 20th-century history of the Middle East, concentrating on the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, Turkey, the Arabian peninsula, and Iran. We will begin by examining the late Ottoman Empire and close with the events of 9/11 and their aftermath. Readings will include historical surveys, novels, and primary source documents.
Author(s): Russell, Mona L.,Lewitt, Shariann