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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Topics include major international directors, the conventions and innovations of popular genres, and key aesthetic movements. Prerequisite(s): English 220, 297, or 298 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course examines the principles and history of film aesthetics by focusing in depth on the work of one or two individual directors (for example, Alfred Hitchcock or Akira Kurosawa) or on a particular stylistic movement (such as Film Noir, the French New Wave, Hong Kong Action Cinema) that has had a significant impact on filmmaking more generally. The course's emphasis is less on the interaction of individual films with the cultures that produce them, and more on the development of film language and style. Questions to be considered are: what is film style Can style be defined individually or nationally How do styles evolve over the course of a career and with the introduction of new technologies Ultimately, how are style and meaning related
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3.00 Credits
Explores the intersection of American film and culture, with special attention to the dialogue between Hollywood and other institutions, ideologies, and events. Specific topics vary from semester to semester. Prerequisite(s): English 220, 297, or 298 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: The purpose of this course is both to teach students to analyze film within a larger cultural matrix - what do films tell us about American culture what does American culture teach us about film - and to introduce the methodology of cultural studies by way of visual and narrative analysis. The course is structured around a particular filmic genre (melodrama, film noir, horror, etc.) and/or historical moment (the 1940s, the postwar era, the 1980s etc.) which varies from semester to semester. Recent topics have included "Hollywood Melodrama and Popular Feminism, 1937-1990" and "Conspiracy Film from the Cold War and After, 1945-2000." In each semester, the selected films are read alongside relevant contemporaneous material as part of an ongoing conversation between Hollywood films and the culture that produces them. Questions to be considered include: Are Hollywood films mere reflections of the society that produces them or do they play an active role in the evolution of social institutions Can popular film be a force for social change How and what do mainstream movies mean
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3.00 Credits
Topics will vary from semester to semester. May be repeated for credit as topic varies. Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course allows the selection of topics arising in other period courses for more in-depth study. Examples may include "Films of the Cold War and After", "The British Modernist Novel", "Gender and Class in the Nineteenth-Century Novel", or "Victorian Fantasy." Topics vary by semester, and the course may be taken more than once for credit.
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3.00 Credits
An exploration of the nature and function of tragedy in the West, based on a study of the theory of tragic drama and of representative works from the Greeks to the moderns. Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course traces the development of the tragic mode in Western drama. Few other literary modes have been as resilient in the history of Western culture, and this is partly due to the unique adaptability of this genre to changing historical, political, socio-economic and other cultural conditions. In order truly to understand the complex nature and role of tragedy in the West, therefore, it is necessary to study its various manifestations across historical periods and national boundaries. Some of the problems the course explores include the nature of the tragic; how tragedy imagines the individual and his/her relationship to society; how tragedy imagines the relationship between human beings and the divine and between human beings and history. The course pays particular attention to the various ways in which tragedy has functioned as a site of affirmation or contestation of prevalent cultural/political values and ideals. Some of the playwrights investigated in this course may include Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Racine, Büchner, Chekhov, Ibsen, Pirandello, Beckett, Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Lorraine Hansberry, and Marsha Norman. Non-dramatic texts, including poems, novels, and films may also be included.
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3.00 Credits
Study of theater with regard to its social relevance. Examination of the ways in which theater not only reflects but also seeks to intervene in cultural and political debates relevant to a given society. Attention to the politics of form and production as well as to the politics of reception. Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: Theater and Society pursues the study of theater with regard to its social relevance. It examines the various ways in which theater not only reflects but also seeks to intervene in ongoing cultural and political debates relevant to a given society. It draws attention to the politics of form and production as well as to the politics of reception. Topics might include such offerings as "Theater and Politics/Political Theater", "Theater and War," or "Postcolonial Theater
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3.00 Credits
Surveys the various ways in which thinkers have conceived of cinema since before its inception--what André Bazin referred to as "the film idea"--to contemporary debates about the "end" of film and the advent of New Media. Prerequisite(s): FMST 201 or ENGL 220 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1
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3.00 Credits
Ways of looking at art and literature in their philosophical context. Theories applied to a variety of literary texts. Prerequisite(s): One unit of 300-level English with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course considers ways of looking at art and literature in their philosophical context. Theories of such philosophers and writers as Plato, Dante, Pope, Kant, Wordsworth, Shelley, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Jung, Robert Penn Warren, Sartre, Woolf, and Derrida are applied to texts ranging from the Bible to Ulysses.
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3.00 Credits
Developments in literary theory from Formalism to the present. Schools and approaches include New Criticism, Feminism, Marxism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, Psychoanalytic Criticism, New Historicism, and Cultural Studies. Prerequisite(s): One unit of 300-level English with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: The emergence of literary studies as a discipline with its own methodologies and theoretical underpinnings is a relatively recent development, with beginnings in the early twentieth century. After a brief overview of ancient conceptions of literature, we turn to the study of Russian Formalism and American New Criticism, which set about putting literary studies on an equally rigorous foundation with scientific disciplines of the day. We then survey a range of approaches to the study of literature that followed from mid-century on, most of which had origins in other disciplines. These schools or critical theories include Feminism and Marxism, Structuralism (influenced by linguistics and anthropology), Reader-Response criticism (from German philosophy) Deconstruction (from French philosophy), Psychoanalysis (from Freud and other psychologists), and New Historicism and Postcolonial criticism (both blending Marxism and post-structuralism). This is a course that emphasizes the analysis of theoretical texts (many of which are quite difficult) more than practical, applied criticism, though we spend time both reading and writing criticism of literary texts as well.
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3.00 Credits
How creative tools available to poets shape and influence presentation of theme. Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course is about the meaning of poetic form. We are concerned with the basic mechanics of traditional formal verse in the English language as it has developed in England and North America since the 14th century and with the values conferred on its forms by various reading communities (by readers and writers who saw themselves as working within and upholding a central tradition and by those who saw themselves as deliberately working against or outside such a tradition). The first part of the course reviews basic methods for perceiving, describing, and interpreting the formal mechanics of verse in English (with particular attention to the rise of modern accentual-syllabic verse). The second part covers various conceptual and historical matters: the development of period styles, the ideological content and context of particular lyric genres and devices, the development of an "English Poetic Tradition" in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, and a series of stances in opposition to that tradition among British and American poets of the 19th and 20th centuries.
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3.00 Credits
Considers novels in the context of a variety of theoretical approaches, asking what theory can tell us about the novel and, equally important, what the novel can tell us about theory. Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: In this course students read a selection of novels that represent the historical development of the novel in its various manifestations since its emergence in the early eighteenth century as what would become the dominant modern literary genre. These include at least one novel (e.g., Jane Austen's Emma or Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights) that is linked to the romance, the narrative mode that was most characteristic of Western culture prior to the rise of the novel; at least one novel that represents the realism which strongly typified the genre in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and which is still an important tendency in the novel (e.g., Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders or Charles Dickens's Great Expectations); at least one early twentieth-century modernist novel (e.g., Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway); at least one example of postmodern fiction (e.g., Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, or perhaps a novel in the style called "magical realism" such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude); and perhaps a contemporary novel that is an amalgam of several of these novelistic modes, such as Ian McEwan's Atonement. Beyond attending to the different modes of fiction and to their historical development, students examine each of the novels from several of the theoretical perspectives that have been brought to bear on narrative fiction in recent decades, perspectives associated, for example, with Marxist theory, feminist theory, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and so on. Students attend to two larger questions as they progress through the course: What is a novel How should I read a novel
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