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Keywords: seventeenth century
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- Abstract: In this course the conquest and colonization of the Americas is considered, with special attention to the struggles of native peoples in Guatemala, Canada, Brazil, Panama, and colonial New England. In two segments of the course-one devoted to the Jesuit missionization of the Huron in the 1630s, the other to struggles between the government of Panama and the Kuna between 1900 and 1925-students examine primary documents such as letters, reports, and court records, to draw their own conclusions. Attention focuses on how we know about and represent past eras and other peoples, as well as on the history of struggles between native Americans and Europeans.
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: This course examines the production, transmission, preservation and qualities of folk music in the British Isles and North America from the 18th century to the folk revival of the 1960s and the present. There is a special emphasis on balladry, fiddle styles, and African-American influences. The class sings ballads and folk songs from the Child and Lomax collections as well as other sources as we examine them from literary, historical, and musical points of view. Readings supply critical and background materials from a number of sources. Visitors and films bring additional perspectives.
- Subject:
Humanities, Social Sciences
- Grade Level:
Post-secondary
- Collection:
MIT OpenCourseWare
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: This subject will introduce students to scholarship about folk music of the British Isles and North America. We will define the qualities of "folk music" and "folk poetry," including the narrative qualities of ballads, and we will try to recreate the historical context in which such music was an essential part of everyday life. We will survey the history of collecting, beginning with Pepys' collection of broadsides, Percy's Reliques and the Gow collections of fiddle tunes. The urge to collect folk music will be placed in its larger historical, social and political contexts. We will trace the migrations of fiddle styles and of sung ballads to look at the broad outlines of the story of collecting folk music in the USA, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
- Subject:
Humanities, Social Sciences
- Grade Level:
Post-secondary
- Collection:
MIT OpenCourseWare
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: Introduces practice and theory of literary criticism. Seminar focuses on topics such as the history of critical methods and techniques, and the continuity of certain subjects in literary history. Instruction and practice in oral and written communication. Topic: Theory and Use of Figurative Language. This seminar offers a course of readings in lyric poetry. It aims to enhance the student's capacity to understand the nature of poetic language and the enjoyment of poetic texts by treating poems as messages to be deciphered. The seminar will briefly touch upon the history of theories of figurative language since Aristotle and it will attend to the development of those theories during the last thirty years, noting the manner in which they tended to consider figures of speech distinct from normative or literal expression, and it will devote particular attention to the rise of theories that quarrel with this distinction. The seminar also aims to communicate a rough sense of the history of English-speaking poetry since the early modern period. Some attention will be paid as well to the use of metaphor in science.
- Subject:
Humanities, Social Sciences
- Grade Level:
Post-secondary
- Collection:
MIT OpenCourseWare
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: The development of major fields in the physical and life sciences, beginning with eighteenth-century Europe and ending with twentieth-century America. Examines ideas, institutions, and the social settings of the sciences, with emphasis on how cultural contexts influence scientific concepts and practices.
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: How is it that a small, poor country in northern Europe became one of the most dynamic centres of Enlightenment thinking? This unit examines the cultural, intellectual and religious characteristics of Scotland in the eighteenth century that led to the eme
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: The Creole languages spoken in the Caribbean are linguistic by-products of the historical events triggered by colonization and the slave trade in Africa and the `New World'. In a nutshell, these languages are the results of language acquisition in the specific social settings defined by the history of contact between African and European peoples in 17th-/18th-century Caribbean colonies. One of the best known Creole languages, and the one with the largest community of speakers, is Haitian Creole. Its lexicon is primarily derived from varieties of French as spoken in 17th-/18th-century colonial Haiti; yet some of its structures seem to have emerged under the influence of African languages, mostly from West and Central Africa. And yet other properties seem to have no analogues in any of the source languages. Through a sample of linguistic case studies focusing on Haitian Creole morphosyntax, we will explore creolization from a cognitive, historical and comparative perspective. Using Haitian Creole and some of its Caribbean congeners as test cases, we will evaluate various hypotheses about the development of Creole languages and about the role of first- and second-language acquisition in such development. We will also explore the concept of Creolization in its non-linguistic senses. Then we will address questions of "Caribbean identities" by examining a sample of Creole speakers' attitudes toward the Creole language and the corresponding European language and toward the African and European components of their ethnic make-up.
- Subject:
Humanities, Social Sciences
- Grade Level:
Post-secondary
- Collection:
MIT OpenCourseWare
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