The Supernatural in Music, Literature and Culture
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this humanities course tracing how supernatural beliefs shaped music and literature from 1600 to the present. It examines works including Shakespeare's plays, Verdi's operas, Goethe's Faust, Gounod's Faust opera, Henry James's ghost stories, and Benjamin Britten's compositions, reading them alongside scholarship on magic, ghosts, and the occult in social history. The course looks at how ambiguity and interpretation function across art, science, and belief, asking why audiences kept returning to ghosts, witches, and demons even as scientific rationalism advanced. Materials include the syllabus, reading and listening lists, and assignments as posted on MIT OpenCourseWare, free to use under a Creative Commons license with no certificate offered. It suits anyone curious about the cultural history behind familiar supernatural stories set to music and text.