Course: Stylistics: Using Linguistics to Explore Texts and Meaning
Length: 4 weeks, 4 hrs/wk
School/platform: FutureLearn/ University of Huddersfield (UK)
Instructor: Dan McIntyre, Lesley Jeffries and Louise Nuttall
Quote:
Stylistics is the study of linguistic style in texts. It helps to explain how politicians mislead; how novelists and poets move their readers; how advertisers persuade us to buy their products and how the media influence public opinion. Stylistics empowers students to become critical readers by developing rigorous techniques of linguistic analysis.
Style in this course is defined as “linguistic choices made by the producers of texts.” I write a lot about what I read, and my primary focus is how a particular story or novel affects me the way it does, so I jumped at the chance to take a mooc that might help me better understand what I’m reading, and possibly communicate my understanding of it more effectively. This was an introductory course with no particular prerequisites, so it covered a few general topics and created (hopefully) the desire to learn more.
First up was foregrounding. We looked at how unexpected word choices or even spellings can emphasize some aspect of a text, and at the use of parallelism and defamiliarization. for a similar effect. Just yesterday I posted about a story’s use of repetition and what I called “almost-anaphora” in the opening pages, and I’m still debating some phrasing regarding the narrator’s gender and what it might mean.
Week Two featured characterization, and ventured into two areas that are of particular interest to me. One is Grice’s theory of implicatures, something I first came across in a wonderful logic mooc offered by the University of Melbourne (it is, sadly, no longer available), so I was thrilled to see this topic again here. Another topic I enjoyed was subtitles, and how these sometimes have to be altered to fit in allocated time and space. This week happened to coincide with several twitter comments about the English subtitles for The Squid Game, which some viewers felt left out a great deal. We also looked at bottom-up versus top-down processing, and how conversational style gives information on characters.
The third week took a look at speech presentation. Part of this covered the range of discourse from direct speech to indirect free discourse to narration and the implications of each level. We also looked at the more real-life situations of reportage, and how even accurate quotations can be used to convey something that was not said. Anyone paying attention to what is happening to news coverage, particularly of elections and legislative agendas, has some experience with this.
Finally, we looked at corpus techniques such as key words and collocations in connection with concepts such as semantic prosody. I confess I didn’t do much of the actual software work due to lack of time; I’d just taken the course using these techniques on Shakespearean writings, so I used what was provided rather than doing my own software runs. Nevertheless, the material included a lot of interesting tidbits, such as: the word “asked” appears quite a bit more frequently in The Wizard of Oz than would be expected, leading to the question, what might that indicate about the story?
Each week started out with a video introduction; written articles made up most of the rest of the material, except during the corpus section which included several videos on using the software. I tend to find this approach disappointing – if you’re going to do a mooc, why not use features that aren’t available in books and articles, like videos and animations – but since the course is likely to appeal to readers, it’s hard to complain about it. As with audited FutureLearn courses, there are no grades, although a brief quiz wraps up each week; I found them useful as a review of the material.
The message boards were active, and staff, particularly lead instructor Dan McIntyre, gave frequent feedback and answered questions promptly.
And, as with the mooc on Shakespeare’s Language from Lancaster that I took a couple of months ago, the discussion boards provided me the opportunity to ask a general question about the subject. That is, I asked, given that close reading usually generates the same insights that statistical examination of the text does, what is the benefit of corpus linguistics in literary analysis? I was not asking a hostile question, quite the contrary; the inquiry was generated by a nonfiction piece by Pam Houston I read in Pushcart 2019 (this is the second Houston essay that’s really given me something to bounce off of) which was in part dismissive of a corpus-based technique she referred to as distant reading. I wanted to know how to respond to such resistance, since I find the use of such analysis, as I’ve encountered it in three moocs now, to be fascinating. How does one respond, I asked, so such dismissal? Is there an example where statistical methods have changed traditional literary interpretation?
Prof. McIntyre took the time to give me a rather extensive response that included several points: evidentiary confirmation of intuition and rhetorical persuasion with evidence is no small thing in itself; and that changing interpretation is not the point, but adding greater nuance to existing interpretation is. He provided an example from his own work on Hemingway’s use of subordinate clauses (Papa H does not underuse them, as is often claimed, but uses them in direct speech rather than narration) and gave me the link to a paper using semantic prosody, one of the concepts examined in the course, to consider an alternative to irony in a particular poem.
It’s been my experience that discussion and staff participation is one of the strengths of FutureLearn. This is the second time I’ve received a detailed and specific response to a question related to, but slightly outside, the course material. It’s really quite exciting. This would be a great class for anyone who’d like to better understand how writing affects us, from how literature works to how politicians and salespeople try to influence our choices. Even those who’ve done significant prior work in literary analysis will probably find something new, particularly in the final week.
Length: 5 weeks, 1-2 hrs/wk
Yu Hua’s China in 10 Words, the only nonfiction covered in the course, served as both an entry into the class, and a wrap-up, as the course is situated within a series about understanding China. An entry survey asked us to come up with ten words we connect with China, prior to reading the works or taking the course. Given the coincidence of taking this during a pandemic that began in China, and living in a country with a leader whose racism is front and center, it was a bit disconcerting [Note: I took this course in the Spring; this post has just been sitting in my notes document since then, but I… well, I forgot about it until I saw it the other day]. I connect China with the philosophies of the Warring States period, with the poetry of the Tang (or is it Song, I get them confused) dynasty, and with bits and pieces I’ve encountered in other moocs. At the end of the course, the instructor and his grad students came up with their own list of ten words to summarize contemporary China; they of course know a lot more than I do about it.
Initially, I thought Lenin’s Kisses by Yan Lianke would be the book I’d be most likely to read on my own, just based on the description: a satiric novel about a kind of travelling circus of disabled people from a poor village who turn to entertainment for economic survival. From the excerpt included, I get the impression there are important nuances that I couldn’t follow, so I’m not sure it’s where I would start.
the excerpts in translation that were provided), so that makes it tempting as well. Red Sorghum by Mo Yan, a “native soil” novel about peasant China (their word, not mine) rounded out the field.
enough to continue. Let’s face it, I’ve taken pretty much all the moocs I was interested in already, and the new ones lean heavily towards vocational/technical instruction rather than academics. 
took a couple of years ago, and The Tale of Genji was discussed in the World Literature 
books inserted into the sculpture and the kinds of paper decorations. I’d never heard of this before. A creative assignment rounded out the videos and questions: how would you design a time capsule of similar meaning? 
are used to bring the reader into the story (illustrations using the same house from different angles, for instance), and calligraphic techniques that vary depending on the work. Both form and content of the works is discussed, with an emphasis on how one affects the other. 
Three months, one thousand pages of source text, two additional critical/historical texts, one mooc and one OCW later – I have some idea of how that madness feels.
of academic essays on various literary aspects of the novel (which was great), plus a 
And oh by the way… since I was watching both OSP and the Yale lectures on Youtube, other Don Quixote videos cropped up, and I discovered a 
Contemporary editions of DQ almost always include both Parts I and II, but Prof. González points out that Cervantes did not originally intend to write a second book. Given how well Part II recapitulates, and un-enchants (I’ll get to this), part I, it’s hard to believe this was not in the works, but he finished Part I and did some other things before realizing he’d written a best-seller, and a sequel might be a good idea. They were published ten years apart, but another writer, using the pseudonym Alonzo Fernandez de Avellaneda, wrote a “False Quixote” in between. Cervantes became aware of this as he was writing Part II, and – this is where I get goosebumps – references it several times. It’s part of the self-reflexivity of the novel, a feature I particularly enjoyed.
I love the layered narration. The text has a narrator, of course. But this narrator, at the end of Part I, Chapter 8 (remember, Part I has 52 chapters) announces that “at this very point the author of this history leaves the battle unfinished, excusing himself on the ground that he hasn’t found anything more written about these exploits of Don Quixote than what he has narrated.” In Chapter 9, this narrator tells us he came across a street vendor selling notebooks written in Arabic. A Moorish passerby translated the title: History of Don Quixote de la Mancha, written by Cide Hamete Benengeli, an Arab historian – a relative of whom, by the way, may be one of the minor characters in one chapter. Our in-story narrator hired the anonymous Moor to translate the whole thing, which the narrator has set down. And of course all of this is written by Cervantes. It raises the question of the God-like status of writers creating worlds, and also leads to the question, so who, or Who, wrote Cervantes? From the little I’ve read about it, this technique features prominently in the Rushdie work as well.
This narrative technique, linked to the Master Pedro puppet show (II.25-26) is featured in the George Haley essay in the Casebook, appropriately titled “The Narrator in Don Quixote: Maesa Pedro’s Puppet Show.” Prof. González also put a little sketch on the board in his 
There’s so much more. Every aspect of Spanish political, religious, social, and economic culture is brought into the tale, either symbolically or literally. Sancho turns out to be a natural logician, as he solves a problem closely resembling the Liar’s Paradox. Don Quixote offers a good deal of advice to writers in various places, mostly following Aristotle, which is particularly ironic since Cervantes left Aristotle in the dust. The Cave of Montesinos as an analog of Dante’s Inferno; Sancho’s ceremony at Altisadora’s catafalque as an analog of the Inquisition. George Mason Professor of Spanish Literature 
Antonio Carreño-Rodríguez’ paper (“Costello + Panza = Costanza: Paradigmatic Pairs in Don Quixote and American Popular Culture”) citing DQ and Sancho as the original comedy team, leading to Abbott & Costello, and later, Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza. The death of Don Quixote, which Borges considers the reason for the entire book. And the opening question: can books drive one insane?
The early modern period was an exciting time for invention and innovation. On this course, you’ll explore book production using examples from Trinity College Dublin and the Edward Worth Library, Dublin.
It’s hard to imagine a world where books aren’t readily available or easily ordered at local bookstores and libraries, let alone Amazon and other online sources. This course takes us back to such a time when the printed book joined, and eventually took over from, manuscripts. 
of books banned by the Catholic church; my favorite topic was printer’s devices.
the course ends. An upgrade to unlimited access, graded material, and a Certificate of Completion would have cost $59; an Unlimited option, offering access to all courses for one year plus Certificates of Completion, is available for $249. 
Course: 
The first course on the Hebrew Bible was more or less formal lecture and covered the expected material: the J, P, D, and E sources, which prophets were Northern Kingdom and which were Southern, who was pre-exile, post-exile, and trans-exile, etc. The instructor demonstrated great fondness for the texts, and made convincing arguments that, contrary to later opinion in Christian culture, Judaism was not all about law and rules. The origin of some of the most familiar Biblical stories in ancient mythologies from around the middle East, the changing covenant with God from suzerainty to a more Zionist approach to the less concrete displayed in Job are outlined, along with the history that provoked these changes. I always thought the book of Job was one of the earliest in the Bible; turns out, the basic story is very old, but the philosophical construction reflects a much later period in ancient Israel’s history.
The New Testament instructor took a more casual, interactive approach, injecting frequent humor and asking for input from the in-person class. The formation of the Canon was a running theme, as was the wide variety of Christianities that existed in the first two centuries and the texts that were winnowed from what has now become the standard Bible. Viewing the Bible as a library, rather than as a single book, was a helpful way of dealing with some of the contradictions found between different books. Different views of Jesus as seen through different Gospels – including a few that aren’t in most contemporary Christian canons – were lined up with possible authorships. Paul’s letters were thoroughly covered, as well as the pretend-Paul letters and other letters that show various types of Christianity in the first couple of centuries after Christ.
straightforward interpretive approach, the 
The final week focused on an extended interview with playwright/director/actor Keith Hamilton Cobb, whose American Moor is not a setting of the play but an “
the score, so some written work is necessary to earn a passing grade. Whether you wish to cheat or not is between you and your conscience. 
Week 1 was a general introduction to the Book of Kells, which until embarrassingly recently I thought was something like The Book of Runes, with kells as a form of ancient alphabet. No, no, no: the book is a four-volume compendium of the Gospels, and Kells is the town of the monastery where the book was probably partly written, then was housed (and stolen! but recovered) for centuries. Written about 800 CE (a 1200 year old book!), it has a complex history, and in the 17th century was given to the Trinity College library where it is on exhibit to the public. It’s become a prominent symbol of Ireland and an example of the earliest Irish art. 
digitalized images, is remarkably similar. For someone not that familiar with, or interested in, manuscript production, this might be just the right depth. 
Week 4 looked at how the book became a symbol of Irish culture, from the knot imagery to its incorporation into literature – everything from James Joyce to Guardians of the Galaxy. More about its display was explained, including the Turning of the Page every eight weeks or so: each of the four volumes is kept in a glass case to protect it from the elements, but different pages are displayed throughout the year. And of course the pages have been digitized and can be viewed 
iconography, which was marvelous and memorable; I also pasted lost of images into my notes for future reference. 
I took a class similar to this one in college, but of course that was a very long time ago. I tracked down the textbook through my library, a thousand-page-in-tiny-print-on-onionskin compilation of Profound Thoughts from creation to last week (I had a book very much like this in college, too). Alas, I confess, I did very little of the reading. I’m not 20 years old any more (not that I was 20 years old in college, either; it took me a while to get there), after all. 
genius, well, it’s probably because you don’t have little kids. Tony the Tow Truck is a picture book for toddlers, clocking in at about 188 words total. In keeping with Russian formalism, Prof. Fry parsed it linguistically (the repeated “t” sounds common in folklore), psychologically (the narcissism of the repeated “I” sentences and the return to an earlier, safer state), socially (the snooty cars that won’t help Tony, and the friend that will), and in terms of identity and community (relationships). It’s kind of amazing. I wrote papers like this. I always thought it was sophistry. 
Of course, there are no tests or quizzes, and it’s purely a solo effort with no other students. I’ve tried to get others interested, but no one wants to play. 
Course: 
As it turned out, the mooc was a broad overview of the major themes and techniques, consisting of a total of about 2 hours of videos in 15-minute stints. The additional work included annotating the poem for specific features (highlight indications it is an Epic, that Satan is a hero in the opening books, etc). This required using an annotation package that afforded the opportunity to see others’ annotations. I hate this sort of thing, so I skipped it. The other coursework was mandatory discussion posts, which I also skipped. 
fact, an extreme radical, since he called for beheading King Charles I, which eventually happened in the English Civil War. And, oh yeah, he had daddy issues, one of the recurrent phrases in Overly Sarcastic Production’s very sarcastic (and irreverent, and hilarious, but not inaccurate) 
Courses:
The first mooc examines a pair of manuscripts describing the Second Temple in Jerusalem, and the Tabernacle (a temporary and portable version used before the Temple was built, particularly during the forty years the Hebrews wandered around the Sinai). The second mooc looks at a codex with three different manuscripts on medieval medical practices, and uses these as a way to trace the flow of ideas from Galen to the Islamicate to Europe. 
end-page glossaries include local dialect vocabularies for practitioners who need to buy these substances from Italian vendors. 
renowned physician/philosopher Avicenna came along and wrote an even better text, overshadowing Majusi’s work and pushing him into relative historic obscurity. 
pertinent sections of the manuscript are embedded in the videos. Links to the complete digitized manuscripts from the Penn collection are hard to find, but they’re there (check the Syllabus). 
I almost missed these offerings entirely. edX hasn’t publicized the current Tabernacle course at all (I saw it on a tweet by Class Central), and it was only through the Syllabus that I learned about the Jewish Medicine course. That’s a shame, since they’re terrific. I’ve been a bit of a snob about mini-moocs (I’ve called them “Youtube plus a quiz”) but I have to re-think that. For anyone interested in Jewish cultural history, medieval medicine, or manuscript studies, these are tiny little gems. 
survey courses, that I prefer depth to breadth. Still, while there were a few “catalog lectures” early on (this god does that, this demon does the other thing), I found many of the units quite interesting – and last three weeks were great.
adaptations, was particularly rich in this. I was a bit surprised gods, angels, and demons weren’t explicitly connected across cultures (the nature theme, for example), since it seemed to me there were obvious similarities and differences. I probably should have been more active on the forums to discuss these.
the way). I found the lectures on Buddhism to be nearly incomprehensible (I stuck with my interpretation – Buddha was an agnostic who incorporated Hindu gods as a marketing tool – and moved on), but 23 out of 24 is still excellent any way you cut it. 
evolving story of the acheiropoieton, the miraculous portrait of Jesus “not painted by human hands”, to be of great interest. I also loved the last week, a more in-depth case study of another continuing saga of a miracle, this one from Coptic Egypt involving the moving of a mountain. Manuscripts got into the act, and, well, manuscripts, what else can I say. I feel like I finally have some understanding of Copts beyond “Egyptian Christians.” That, to me, is the real value of these types of courses: we feel more connected to places we’ll probably never go, places like the Muqattam area of Cairo, Ise in Japan, Armenia, and Georgia. These days, we need all the connection we can get. 
including archaeology, history in general, the history of ideas, the history of religions, the history of literature, and the branch of philology called textual criticism or (in a larger sense), textual scholarship.” Oooh, now there’s a mooc I want to take! We got a glimpse of this during the last two weeks, in the tracing of the miraculous portrait and the moving of the mountain. I hope to discover more along those lines in future moocs. 
their entirety, the course focused on specific sections as exemplars of various points; individual chapters or short groups of chapters were the only assigned reading. 
And yes, since there were a lot of unfamiliar names, and since this was material I want to retain long-term, I used Cerego, so I’ll be getting questions about “Handing Grettir Around” periodically over the next year (you’ll have to take the course to see why that’s such a delightfully amusing prospect). This was particularly helpful when the final exam rolled around, since I’d been seeing the material at various intervals all along. 
so few profs can pull off), in the podcasts he and Beth came across as real people, and delightful, fun people at that. Because manuscripts are of particular interest to me, I found the W2 episode most helpful with course material, but later episodes were great fun, featured saga/Viking re-enactors, musicians, craftspeople, and a host of off-the-cuff topics (such as reactions when people hear Beth’s dissertation is on dairy products in Scandinavian literature. Turns out, skyr is pretty interesting, and I wish Iceland luck in promoting it as a substitute for Greek yogurt (if they can produce a fat-free, sugar-free, 80-calorie, 12-grams-of-protein, fruity version for under $1 a serving, I’m in). I discovered the podcasts a bit late, only after Week 2, and they made a huge difference in my perception of the course as a whole. 
I wish there had been a “preview podcast” available from the start in the course material; I think I would have had an easier time with Week 1, a general introduction to Icelandic sagas. I found this week to be the most difficult, probably because I had no background to rely on. I briefly considered giving up at some point, but I really wanted to get to W2, which focused on manuscripts. I had more background here and was able to get a better footing. From there I was hooked, through weeks on the role of landscape in the sagas, how women were portrayed, the depictions of paganism and the Church and the importance of the conflict during conversion, and the supernatural in the sagas. 
The forums were active and well-supported, with questions suggested for each week. I asked a few outside questions (some of them clearly outside the course material). When it worked, it was great: I asked about the “missing rubric” mentioned in a lecture, and Beth went out of her way to bring Robert, the resident manuscript expert, to the boards; I ended up with a lovely example. The course also had a Facebook page, but since I gave up on Facebook way way back when they decided they could manage my feed better than I could (and have no desire to start again, given the disclosures of recent weeks), I missed out on that.
and a half before agreeing to the Christianization of Iceland, then threw his pagan statues into Goðafoss, the waterfall of the gods. I loved learning about things like the Gráskinna, the “ gray skin” manuscript with the sealskin cover that, through subtle changes, makes Hallgerður more sympathetic to the reader; about the contemporary researchers like Jesse Byock, who excavated Mosfell in search of clues about Egils saga, and Emily Lethbridge whose SagaMap plots locations from the different sagas. 
I knew it was a one-play-a-week course, and, at 2-3 hours a week, I figured things would be pretty sparse. While it wasn’t as detailed as the Wellesley courses from last year, which went page-by-page through four plays, it turns out the close focus on two speeches per play served as a very nice platform for covering a wide range of poetic and dramatic devices. I’m also historically somewhat suspicious of phrases like “find your own meaning” as it typically indicates there’s no content, but there was plenty of content here; yet there was ample room for bringing in personal associations and impressions. I participated more in the forums than I have in any course for quite some time, and found that quite rewarding, as there was both staff and student interaction. 
The basic plot of each play was outlined at the beginning of the week; reading or watching each play was not required (or even encouraged beyond the obvious value). Because the focus was on emotion, other faculty was drawn in, including Matt Dry of the Psychology department who explained the physical, cognitive, and behavioral interactions of emotions, and Brid Phillips from the Center of Excellence for the History of Emotions who studies the emotional context in older literature, including Shakepeare. But literary structure was on the menu as well. The course compared various forms of speech in the plays (prose, blank verse, poetry) and how each differed in style as well as detail. 
The material included a variety of forms: lectures, interviews, and readings. Graded assignments were equally diverse: brief quizzes, discussion questions for the Forums, and a final self-graded Assignment inviting a personal interpretation of one of the speeches. I generally dislike what I refer to as forced-posting; counting discussion forum posts as graded items on questions with narrow focus. Here, for some reason, it worked very well for me. I think that’s partly because I found I could respond to the questions posed without even trying; they were questions I wanted to answer (in most cases; I did skip a few). It might also be because the response from staff was very prompt and encouraging, and other students also interacted, all of which made me feel like I’d made a contribution. It helped that I’d studied the first few plays in other courses so was more comfortable with the material, but maybe it was just my mood at the time. In any case, I greatly enjoyed that aspect of the course. 
My favorite week was The Winter’s Tale, a play I haven’t encountered before; the themes of repentance and forgiveness always work for me. I was also greatly surprised at how much I enjoyed the week devoted to Henry V; I’ve always avoided the history plays, but they managed to find a couple of speeches that might turn out to be ways in for me. And it helps that it’s one of the plays featured in a Star Trek: TNG episode. Throughout the course, I should say, I was the “bearer of low culture”, bringing in television, songs, and movies. It’s a role I greatly enjoyed, and no one seemed to mind – but then, in a course where the lead instructor shows off her Shakespeare Rubber Duckie (to quack, or not to quack) and Lady Hamlet Guest Soap (out, damned spot) how could they mind?. 
I highly recommend it for those who haven’t read much Shakespeare or haven’t really found it that enjoyable; the narrow focus on specific scenes and emotions, rather than an onslaught of information about every aspect of the plays, might be the way in for you. And for those who’ve been around the plays a bit more, you might find some interesting tidbits as well; if nothing else, you have a chance to strut your stuff.
• Design as a way of reinforcing, or challenging, social norms and expectations. This ranged from toys (which can restrict play to what is expected by the designer, and is reflected in the parent’s choice of the toy, or can allow creativity to use the toy in unexpected ways) to water bottles, which we evaluated on various criteria (turns out, I was on board with masculine and feminine, but I seem to have no idea what erotic, expensive, cheap, or comfortable look like). 
• Design not only communicates from designer to user, but from user to society. Eyeglasses have become fashionable, conveying less of “something’s wrong with his eyes” to “wow, she must be smart” or “those glasses are awesome”; why not other assistive devices? Why can’t walkers and wheelchairs come in colors, to make them look like fun gizmos instead of something old people use? Prosthetic leg coverings are available in superhero styles; eye patches can be decorated. 
• Harvard mathematician George David Birkhoff came up with ways to quantify aesthetics, both visual and linguistic. I have a lot of knee-jerk issues with this, but it’s an intriguing idea. For all our protestations that aesthetics is separate from rationality, it might not be quite so cut-and-dried (no, do NOT tell me about the golden mean and the Parthenon, I’ve been successfully inoculated against that by the best mathematicians around). 
In addition to lecture videos, the course used a variety of participatory materials. Each week, a poll question started things off, a sort of priming mechanism that touched upon some aspect of the concepts to be covered. Short quizzes followed lecture sequences. Activities like the water bottle evaluation, and associated discussion questions, also contributed grades. The final week included a quiz that turned out to be a comprehensive final exam; I was a bit taken by surprise since it was embedded in the week 6 material (it was labeled “Final Exam” so I need to pay better attention). It was somewhat more difficult than the shorter weekly quizzes sometimes requiring making fine distinctions between elements of a theory, but once my pulse rate went down I found it to be an excellent summary of the material. 
For me, the course was a great success. I was worried that, because I’m not in the field of design and am hampered by my art-blindness, I wasn’t “getting it”, but the final video, a casual discussion amongst three of the instructors, reassured me: 
the Pacific Rim, through the Bronze and Iron ages to Classical civilizations, across the innovations of Chinese, Indian, and Middle Eastern peoples reaching the European Gothic and Renaissance periods via trade, to the exploitation of New World peoples by Old World commerce, the history of our brilliance, our goodness, our stupidity and cruelty, our human-ness. It’s really quite amazing, how much is packed into these twelve weeks.
I’ll admit, I was a bit confused at first – I never expected lemurs to lead off an architecture course – and I wondered if it had simply been mistitled, and should be Archeology or Anthropology. But that was ok, too, it was interesting whatever it was, and eventually I caught on to the point: our skyscrapers, our political systems, our religious belief and the way we furnish our houses, all that proceeded from that paleolithic cave. Somewhere in the last four weeks, the quote above about cultural dramas and activating surroundings appeared, and I fully realized the value of this approach. I do think an introductory video would be a big help, however.
I’m beginning to understand that the term “architecture” encompasses more than buildings. The arrangement of places for various activities – sleeping, eating, burials, ceremonies – was prevalent in some of the early discussions of First Societies, the earliest examples of people living in groups, today exemplified by the !Kung (or San: yes, like the guy from The Gods Must Be Crazy). Yet many of their customs are still with us: eating together, forming circles, rituals for coming of age and hunting (or, as we’d put it, going to work). Prof. Jarzombek is a specialist in First Societies, so we spent a fair amount of time with the Gravettians and the Magdalenians, noting the differences between the two. 
architectures? Climate changes and environmental upheaval such as earthquakes changed trade routes, motivated invasions and migrations, and offered or shut down trade. It was all fascinating, one long story of people moving around, adapting to new conditions. Yet some major world history events were ignored: The Crusades, for example, are not mentioned. Sometimes the timeline got a little blurred, since there was necessarily some back-and-forth as the focus switched geographical areas (and I assume there’s a “Part 2” course that picks up where we left off, but that hasn’t made it to moocland yet). I felt like I understood the general flow of human history much better by the end of this course, and once I got used to the presentation style (it took a couple of weeks), I had a great time. 
And then of course there were buildings, plenty of buildings. Stonehenge, pyramids, Angkor Wat, the basilica of St. Peter, the Hagia Sofia and Dome of the Rock were all featured, but there was a great deal besides: the coastal villages of the Haida, the Maasai in Kenya and the Hammer in Ethiopia, Maltese cave temples, the roof-accessible houses of the early city at Çatal Hüyük (now Turkey), the city of Cahokia – the Native American metropolis that was larger than the London of its time, and remained the largest city in what is now the US until Philadelphia of the early 19th century – steppes, caves, shores, mountains, forests… well,I could go on, but you get the idea. From the adjoining square houses of Turkey, accessible only from the roof, to the amazing rock-cut temples in India, the beautiful mosques with fantastic arches and domes to Hindu and Buddhist shrines and Greek temples and Christian basilicas and Gothic cathedrals to Versailles, it was just amazing to see what people come up with no matter what their level of technology. 
originally pagan temples became churches, mosques, synagogues as populations changed. Then we looked at issues of restoration and preservation. Interesting questions about authenticity came up. And then there’s the amazing approach of Jorge Otero-Pailos, who, among other things, removes layers of dirt from buildings using a special rubber compound, then 
I’m pretty sure this was a pre-existing OCW recycled as a mooc. Sometimes this repackaging works, sometimes it doesn’t; here, I think it did, although I have to admit the content had far more to do with my enthusiasm than the presentation. The ‘live” in-class lecture approach is a bit less polished than a multiple-take video, but I still prefer it, as read-to-camera so often comes off as stilted and nervous. The professor’s enthusiasm and off-the-cuff commentary more than made up for image quality and occasionally confusing syntax. 
The lectures were basically slide shows accompanied by narratives about a period, or descriptions of the architecture under consideration.The visuals were sometimes hard to see, but most of them are available online elsewhere, with the exception of maps drawn on Google Earth scenes, which were… pretty messy, to be honest, and not intuitive. But I understand his point about maps showing current nation boundaries being useless in this context; his maps did contain useful information about migration patterns and available resources. They’re worth getting used to. 
Each week includes two lectures, both about 90 minutes. They estimate 8 hours a week is required for the course; that sounds reasonable to me, though it took me longer because of the way I do things (and I’m slow). A free online textbook was provided; it’s huge, and I found it difficult to use, but I’m not that comfy with online books; someone more used to Kindles and such might find it much easier. A print version is available; it’s pricey, but if I were a freshman humanities student, I’d invest in it. For that matter, if I could find a used copy for $15, I’d buy it. 
I found Cerego invaluable here; there was just too much stuff to remember it all without constant reinforcement. While it’s time-consuming to enter important points from each lecture into a quiz set, it serves as studying, and it was very much worth it when the exams rolled around. And it’s still nice to see the early material cropping up, reminding me of the rest of the lecture around key points. Makes me smile. 
dislike overdirected commentary, but it does provide structure, so it’s really a matter of preference.
Blade Runner clips in particular– “Like tears in rain. Time to die” – were discussed in detail), ballet, songs and rituals from a variety of cultures – Maori, Slavic, Korean, Ethiopian – and more contemporary literature, showing how elements of Greek song culture persists today. 
For example, in the early weeks we covered Achilles’ decision-making process on whether to return to Greece or continue fighting. His mother told him if he left, he would live a long, safe, unheralded life, but if he stayed, he would die but would receive glory (kleos) forever – which has special resonance since we’re reading these words written a few thousand years ago, recited hundreds of years before that. Then, in one of the last hours, we see Plato rewrite Achilles so his decision is not based on a desire for fame but on justice. Is this legal? What does it mean, to edit the story this way? 
and hell, even Oprah took it, or at least took parts of it, since she 
Graded material was minimal: a few multiple choice questions and a set of text-interpretation questions at the end of each hour. The questions were surprisingly difficult, with subtle shades of meaning or levels of detail frequently distinguishing one answer from another. Or maybe I’m just stupid; although I “passed”, I did fairly poorly on the graded material, and often felt perplexed as to why. But since my purpose has nothing to do with grades, I did the best I could to understand what was being asked, versus what I thought was required.
to so many systems I’m only going to use once (and makes me a little nervous in this time of electronic insecurity). So I didn’t request a login/password. I came to regret that about halfway through since I found I had questions and observations I would have liked to have shared. Every week a status email would introduce the new material and give a link for obtaining the necessary permissions, so I could have changed my mind at any point, but I didn’t. 
A free textbook is part of the course; this can be downloaded as a PDF or purchased as an e-book, or just read online. It includes significant introductory details on the video material; I found that I had a much better grasp of things when I spent the time to go through the text before the videos, than when I skipped it for lack of time. Many of the quiz questions I found puzzling were, in fact, in this introductory material, though it took an embarrassingly long time to realize that: details of motivations and deeper levels of interpretation. It’s fascinating reading. 
asides. And, it’s apparently a course a lot of people take more than once, just to get more out of it. 
A Just Recompense 