Studies in Film and Literature
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this comparative course pairing major films with the literary works they echo or challenge. Students examine how narrative techniques translate between page and screen, working through films by Akira Kurosawa, John Ford, Francis Ford Coppola, Clint Eastwood, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, and Federico Fellini alongside texts by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Honore de Balzac, Henry James, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The course gives some grounding in narrative theory and asks students to trace how genre, topic, and style cross between the two media, and how each artwork pushes against cultural, political, and aesthetic boundaries. Materials include the full syllabus, readings list, and assignments as published by MIT; there is no certificate, and all course materials are free to access under MIT's OpenCourseWare license.