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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This course will explore trends, themes, and techniques in contemporary international fiction, with an eye toward broadening the scope of students' fictional vision. Students will read a variety of international authors, discuss issues in global culture, and produce their own border-crossing fiction.
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3.00 Credits
This course will explore trends, themes, and techniques in contemporary comic fiction. Students will read comic short fiction and novels and essays on the comic, discuss theories of humor's effects and how to generate it, and produce their own comic fiction.
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3.00 Credits
Memoir as Literature will introduce students to the field of memoir studies and provide them with an overview of the various debates surrounding the genre and its history. This course might focus on a number of different forms of memoir, including but not limited to Holocaust narratives, women's memoir, non-fiction accounts of illness, and "fake" memoirs.
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3.00 Credits
Readings in the development of autobiography as a literary mode in British and American culture and writing in this mode throughout the quarter, as personal disciplined narrative.
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3.00 Credits
In this course, students will read and analyze poetic and critical works on or about love, acquiring knowledge of the literary forms, traditions and trends of love poetry, and the ethical, philosophical, and cultural issues involved in works of literature that have love as its central subject. Students will also write original poetic works and engage in critical discussion of their own and their classmates' poems.
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3.00 Credits
During a long career as Hollywood screenwriter and director, John Huston (1906-1987) established a reputation as a careful adapter of literary texts into films, including movies of such classic works as Melville's MOBY-DICK, McCullers' REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE, O'Connor's WISE BLOOD, Lowry's UNDER THE VOLCANO, B. Traven's THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE, and James Joyce's "The Dead," as well as films based on popular works such as C.S. Forester's THE AFRICAN QUEEN and Rudyard Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King." These and other films by Huston provoke a number of questions central to this course: Given the differences between film and print media, is it possible to "faithfully" adapt a story or a novel into a movie? How much of his own interpretation of an originating work may a screenwriter/director impose on source material? Is the film to be judged on its own merits or only according to how accurately it represents the source text? To these large critical questions might be added some others, such as whether Huston's films reveal unifying concerns and characteristics despite the widely differing sources. We will watch and discuss selected films in class. Minimum of four 5-7 page papers, comprehensive final.
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3.00 Credits
Beginning with UNCLE JOSH AT THE MOVING PICTURE SHOW and concluding with Woody Allen's HANNAH AND HER SISTERS, this class examines the origins of comic cinema, film comedy's efforts to legitimize itself as a form of entertainment, the consequences of these efforts on the form of film comedy itself, and film comedy's broader relevance to an understanding of the cultural, social, and political history of the twentieth century. We will view and discuss films acclaimed (or, occasionally, not so highly acclaimed) in their own time and try to determine, among other things, how the passage of time and changes in perspective and tastes have affected the messages and reputations of these movies. To some degree, this will be a telescoped course on film history as well, as we experience films from the silent to the modern era and contemplate the consequences of such moments in movie history as the arrival of the star system, the impact of the studio system, and the modern era of the independent film and the blockbuster movie. Occasional writing assignments (3-4 papers of 3-4 pages each) based on specific films and topics, individual projects based on some comic film not viewed in class (to be assigned), comprehensive final examination.
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3.00 Credits
What happens when a novel, short story, play, or poem is turned into a movie? How widely may a film depart from its original source and still be judged a successful adaptation? Is fidelity to an author's intentions the only or indeed even a valid criterion for evaluating a movie based on a literary text? This course is animated by these apparently simple but in fact quite complex questions, which may be addressed in several different ways: by considering adaptations of a single author only (e.g., Henry James), or within a single genre (e.g., the Western), or of and within a variety of American authors and genres. Approaches and methods of student evaluation will vary with different instructors.
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3.00 Credits
Although many critics question whether film noir exists as a genre, the term describes a large number of movies made in the 1940s and 50s that probe the underside of American life, usually featuring marginal male characters who may or may not be criminals or detectives, dark urban environments, dangerous beautiful females who use sex to manipulate and mislead the males with whom they come in contact, cowardly or corrupt police officers, and scheming politicians. "Neo noir" describes films made mostly from the 1970s onward and featuring the same sort of sleazy or disreputable characters and situations, but with the additional dimension of self-conscious reflection of or allusion to antecedents in film noir, whether introduced in homage or as parody or pastiche. Examples of film noir that we will view in this course include THE MALTESE FALCON, DOUBLE INDEMNITY, OUT OF THE PAST, TOUCH OF EVIL, and others as circumstances permit; neo noirs will include CHINATOWN, BODY HEAT, BLUE VELVET, L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, and others as time allows. Students will be responsible for one additional paper on another film noir or neo noir movie to be assigned, as well as occasional topical papers (3 or 4) and a comprehensive final exam.
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3.00 Credits
Western films constitute a uniquely American genre in which a brief period of national history (approximately 1870 to 1890) and the rugged Western landscape are mythologized and made heroic. Themes that dominate Western movies include nation building, individualism, the frontier, and manifest destiny; these stories often involve the dispossession of native nations and the triumph of white Eurocentric values, and sometimes paradoxically celebrate both the self-reliant individual and the formation of a new community from which the hero finds himself excluded. This course begins with the earliest Western, THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY, followed by other significant films of the genre.
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