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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This course follows the historical trajectory of African American performance from slavery to the present. The "texts" of the course are wide-ranging, and include poems, songs, stage plays, stage musicals, comedy acts, films, and music videos. Our objectives are to understand the nature of performance, how performances and their meanings changed over time, how media were adapted to serve historical people's needs, and what performances can convey about performers and audiences. Through the course, students will build an understanding of the history and evolution of American and African American cultural production, while developing tools to analyze the arts. Prereq: Passing letter grade in a 100 level first year seminar in USFS, FSSY, FSCC, FSNA, FSSO or FSCS. Prereq or Coreq: FSTS 100
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3.00 Credits
What is meant when we or our leaders talk about "the American dream"? Is it a political cliché, a myth, or something fundamental to our national ethos? In this seminar students will explore what is meant by "the American dream." We will pose the questions: how it has been defined by artists, writers, political leaders, immigrants and the native-born; how it has changed over time; and to what extent the dream is real and/or imagined? Prereq: Passing letter grade in a 100 level first year seminar in USFS, FSSY, FSCC, FSNA, FSSO or FSCS. Prereq or Coreq: FSTS 100
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3.00 Credits
The course is structured around a historical overview of documentary film from 1920 to the present. We begin with Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922) and focus on a different documentary style each week, from the city symphony films of the late 20s and early 30s (Jean Vigo, On the Subject of Nice, 1930) to avant-garde experiment (Dziga Vertov, The Man with a Movie Camera, 1929), to cinema verite (Rouch and Marin, Confessions of a Summer, 1955) and its effects on the French New Wave (Jean-Luc Godard, Breathless, 1959). Other style will include direct Cinema (Drew and Pennebaker, Primary, 1960), the improvisational style of John Cassavetes, the use of time-lapse photography (Reggio, Koyaanisqatsi, 1982), and, finally the mocumentary (Bob Roberts, 1992). The course will emphasize the importance of ideology, bias, and efforts to capture the "real" through the work of Leni Riefenstahl (Triumph of the Will, 1935), and 1970's examples of Third Cinema in Cuba, Brazil, and Argentina. Each student in The Documentary Impulse will be required to create on five-minute video using a particular documentary mode examined in class, paying attention to ideology, narrative structure, transitions, sounds, and video editing techniques. The final project will use either found stills, or newly shot filmed images, and will include a sound track either from the Freedman Center's archives, or of the student's own creation. Equal time will be devoted to written assignment that analyze the documentary style of particular films. The first half of the course will include a weekly film screening in KSL; after midterms, the location will alternate with the Freedman Center, where students will spend time creating and editing video projects. Prereq: Passing letter grade in a 100 level first year seminar in USFS, FSSY, FSCC, FSNA, FSSO or FSCS. Prereq or Coreq: FSTS 100
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3.00 Credits
How societies define and punish crime is related to a web of interconnected considerations including the form of government, the legal code, social mores, evolving conceptions of justice, the purpose of punishment, and attitudes toward individual criminals and criminality in general. These social, historical, and ethical norms give rise to questions such as: What constitutes a crime? How is the violation of the law different from or similar to transgressions of morality or ethical norms? What is the purpose of punishment and why is this important? To what extent are we interested in the circumstances that lead to crime? In what ways is punishment an insufficient answer to crime? This course will explore the social and historical questions raised by the perpetrators and victims of crime as well as attending punishment in the literary works of Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich von Kleist, Annette von Droste-Hulshoff, Franz Kafka, Bertroit Brecht, Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, and Bernhard Schlink. Focusing on short stories, detective fiction, novels, drama, and personal essay, we will pay particular attention to the way that criminal transgression is defined, the role of society and history in producing criminals, when and why punishment is justified or necessary, and the degree to which these resolutions are "just." Prereq: Passing letter grade in a 100 level first year seminar in USFS, FSSY, FSCC, FSNA, FSSO or FSCS. Prereq or Coreq: FSTS 100
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3.00 Credits
This course uses the intersections of art and music as a way to understand how the arts reflect, interact with, and influence the cultures in which they develop. After an introduction to research and writing in the arts (week 1), the course continues with a survey of certain historical periods and masterpieces of European and American art and music from 1700 to the present (weeks 2-6). It then takes up a few important themes in the interaction of music and the visual: 1) the concert hall as the intersection of architecture and acoustics (week 7); 2) the art museum and its music (week 8); 3) music and film (week 9); 4) the Broadway musical (week 10), and 5) rock music and its artifacts (week 11). A full week (12) of instruction on writing and oral presentation then prepares students for a seminar paper and seminar report, the creation and refining of which constitutes the final phase (weeks 12-15) of the course. Requirements and activities include, in addition to the seminar paper and report, a series of activities including three optional and three required events centered on the Cleveland Museum of Art and its concerts, the Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum. Prereq: Passing letter grade in a 100 level first year seminar in USFS, FSSY, FSCC, FSNA, FSSO or FSCS. Prereq or Coreq: FSTS 100
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3.00 Credits
This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying music in American film. Students will learn to analyze film and music with greater sophistication, to contextualize them in time and place, and to interpret their meanings. The films predominantly feature jazz and popular music. We will discuss several aspects of a film: filmmaking techniques, visual composition, the film's available interpretations, audience reception, and so on. We will also discuss musical composition and performance, artists' self-representation, the link between music and commerce, and so on. Course sources include films and critical literature. The primary focus of the class will be on the ways music and film intersect as entertainment and art. Prereq: Passing letter grade in a 100 level first year seminar in USFS, FSSY, FSCC, FSNA, FSSO or FSCS. Prereq or Coreq: FSTS 100
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3.00 Credits
Through a study of texts that exploit "new world" images like the castaway, the cannibal, the wild man, and the exotic woman, this course explores the ideologies that propelled nineteenth-century imperialism, particularly regarding the British in Australia and South Africa. The class will consider how British settlers made "homes" in hostile and unfamiliar climates, how they addressed the problem of unfriendly and unequal contact with indigenous peoples, and how contemporary novelists reevaluate the historical past. The course will work under the premise that contemporary geopolitical realities have been shaped by the imaginative work of British colonialists who, under the principle of terra nullius or "no man's land," claimed the land and the resources of these southern territories and dismissed the very existence of the indigenous peoples that populated them. The scope of the course will be broadly historical, exploring works that participated in British imperialism, as well as those that take a modern perspective. Course materials will be drawn from a variety of genres, including fiction, poetry, film, ethnography, natural history, history, and criticism. Ultimately, students will consider how narratives participate in the shaping of reality and of real-world relations of power. Prereq: Passing letter grade in a 100 level first year seminar in USFS, FSSY, FSCC, FSNA, FSSO or FSCS. Prereq or Coreq: FSTS 100
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3.00 Credits
Digital technologies have changed the world we live in. This brave new world is populated by new-media, video, games, and social networks. To survive this world we need a vocabulary of criticism and authorship, a "New Media Literacy" that we can use to effectively and efficiently embrace our roles as both artist and critic. This course explores a wide variety of New Media themes in both contemporary and historical contexts. Students in the course will analyze their ever-evolving relationship to New Media as both viewers and creators. Prereq: Passing letter grade in a 100 level first year seminar in USFS, FSSY, FSCC, FSNA, FSSO or FSCS. Prereq or Coreq: FSTS 100
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3.00 Credits
Much of music history emphasizes the text/composition and its author/composer. Yet music is unique among the arts in that a musician must bring the work to life; arguably, a piece of music can only be said to exist in real time, in performance. This course will examine musical performance as it has evolved over the centuries and consider how thinking about performance and performers continues to change. Although an understanding of the rudiments of music will be helpful, students will not need advanced training in music for this course to be of interest. Readings will include historical accounts and reviews as well as articles about performance and musical aesthetics. Further sources will be recorded audio, video and live performances, as well as interactions with performers (and teachers of performers) from the Cleveland Institute of Music and the university's departments of music, theater and dance. The interests and needs of the students will help set the tempo and line of our class discussions. Prereq: Passing letter grade in a 100 level first year seminar in USFS, FSSY, FSCC, FSNA, FSSO or FSCS. Prereq or Coreq: FSTS 100
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3.00 Credits
This seminar will explore the birth, evolution, devolution, and undead nature of the Frankenstein myth in popular culture. Using Mary Shelley's novel, her source texts, 19th- and 20th-century critical accounts, and 19th- and 20th-century popular cultural manifestations, the seminar participants will discover how "Frankenstein" found its way into the Western mind and continues to provoke responses both in those familiar and in those completely unfamiliar with the novel. The course will touch on issues of literary influence, science/technology, religion, ethics, education, literary merit, popular culture relevance, and adaptation as art form. Central questions for the seminar include: (1) Does the Frankenstein myth as we perceive it today have anything to do with Mary Shelley's original novel? (2) What were the moral and ethical implications of Shelley's novel for her time and for the generations afterward? (3) Is an "accurate" film adaptation of a literary work possible or needed? (4) Is being ubiquitous a blessing or a blight for a literary work? Prereq: Passing letter grade in a 100 level first year seminar in USFS, FSSY, FSCC, FSNA, FSSO or FSCS. Prereq or Coreq: FSTS 100
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