Popular Narrative: Masterminds
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this literature seminar examining how fiction imagines total intellectual mastery, tracing the figure of the mastermind through magicians, master spies, detectives, and mad scientists. Readings draw on popular narrative genres to ask what authors mean when they depict a character as all-controlling or all-knowing. The core assignment is an ongoing reading journal that students circulate to classmates over an email mailing list, building a running written conversation about the texts rather than a single final paper. Course materials include the syllabus, reading list, and assignment descriptions as published by MIT. The course sits within MIT's literature curriculum and treats genre fiction as a serious object of literary analysis. No lecture videos are included, and there is no certificate, consistent with MIT OpenCourseWare's standard offering of course materials for self-study.