|
|
Course Criteria
Add courses to your favorites to save, share, and find your best transfer school.
-
4.00 Credits
This is a course about how to read a poem. We will examine poetry's extreme uses of metaphor, its use of language that is by turns more raw, more plain, and more ambiguous than ordinary prose. We'll be thinking about the force of poetic gesture and poetic voice, about poetry's way of telling a story and its way of keeping secrets, about poetry's immense playfulness, its attention to particularly charged moments of passion and knowledge, and its way of animating the inanimate. We will look closely at the formal tools of lyric poetry – meter, rhyme, sound-shape, line – and the use of traditional genres such as riddle, ballad, hymn, ode, and elegy. Readings will concentrate on the work of a small group of poets, including William Shakespeare, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Elizabeth Bishop. Applicable English cluster: Major Authors; Poems, Poetry, and Poetics.
-
4.00 Credits
Toni Morrison has emerged as one of the most influential writers and critics in contemporary American culture. This course will approach her work from a broad range of critical perspectives including black feminist thought, psychoanalysis, trauma theory, Biblical exegesis, postcolonial analysis, and critical race theory. Although this class will emphasize rigorous study of her literary work, we will also pay close attention to her contributions to literary criticism, her role in public life as well as her forays into political and national debates. In our study of her novels, we will explore such issues as the importance of history and myth in the creation of personal identity, constructions of race and gender, the dynamic nature of love, the role of the community in social life, and the pressures related to the development of adolescent girls.
-
4.00 Credits
This course explores ways in which myth functions to create psychological and social identities within cultural frameworks. We will explore tales, graphics, musicals, opera, poetry, and cinema. The texts concentrate primarily on a constellation of Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast adaptations, along with Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Frog Prince, Hansel and Gretel, and some of the Jack stories. Our concern will focus on action/adventure plots, paradigms of exile and return, the ideologies underlying the dynamics of oppression, pain fetishes, aspiration, and recovery. We will examine didactic issues of childhood, adolescence, midolescence, and the aged, as people use myth to address the requirements of life. We will be particularly interested in the implications of historical perspectives as societies revise and perpetually revitalize their visions of themselves through the rewriting of their own mythologies.
-
4.00 Credits
Samuel Beckett is one of the most profound and influential voices in 20th-century literature. He created worlds of immense fullness and desolation, extending the possibilities of drama and fiction while simultaneously stripping away the traditional narrative forms. This course will study Beckett’s major works and then explore his influence, both thematically and stylistically, on such contemporary writers as J.M. Coetzee, Paul Auster, Harold Pinter, Donald Barthelme, John Banville, Lydia Davis, and others.
-
4.00 Credits
Taking place for roughly two weeks in between semesters during the latter part of Christmas break, "Theatre in England" is an English class open to undergraduates in all disciplines and graduate students in English. This year's seminar meets between December 28, 2010, and January 9, 2011. Past students describe this course as “an incredible experience, unlike any other,” “one of the best of my life,” and “the richest exposure to contemporary theater imaginable in a two-week time frame.” English 252/452 is conducted in London and Stratford-upon-Avon ("Shakespeare Country") in late December and early January, varying in dates slightly each year. See - http://www.rochester.edu/College/ENG/england/
-
4.00 Credits
Film Studies involves the critical analysis of the pictorial and narrative qualities of motion pictures, film theory, and film history, understanding film as both industry and creative art. This course unconventionally focuses on the tangible object at the origin of the onscreen image, and what we can learn about the social, cultural and historical value of motion pictures and national film cinemas through an understanding of “Film” as an organic element with a finite life cycle. Focus is on the photographic element, but includes a consideration of alternative “capture media.”
-
4.00 Credits
We will screen and discuss approximately a dozen films that demonstrate the history of the form, from the silent era through the present. We will concentrate particularly on the periods when the form especially flourished, examining not only the films, but also their connection to their time. We will study such movies as “Metropolis,” “The Thing From Another World,” “Blade Runner,” and “The Terminator,” use a critical text on science fiction film; and write some papers on the films.
-
4.00 Credits
We will study the career of a highly regarded contemporary American director whose work, most of it of the more or less violent genres of horror, crime, and suspense, displays both a highly self conscious experimentalism and an acknowledgement of film tradition. In the course we will attempt to discover those particular attributes that define a De Palma film. We will also discuss those directors who most influence his work, especially Alfred Hitchcock, and touch on some of the individual motion pictures that lie behind certain De Palma’s films. In this course we will screen a large selection of the director’s films, in roughly chronological order, concentrating especially on the best known and most successful titles, including Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, and Body Double. The syllabus will include some of the literary texts that provide the sources for some of his films and at least one critical study of the De Palma canon. Assignments will include critical papers and a final examination.
-
4.00 Credits
This course examines diasporic Chinese media--including film, video games, and television--to better understand how these works participate in the dissemination, or globalization, of Chinese culture. Most of the class focuses on Chinese language films from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Republic of China on Taiwan (ROC), Hong Kong (HK), and films from the U.S. that are set in China. We pay special attention to the migrations of individuals—-actors, actresses, directors, cinematographers, and others—-and of the films themselves. We cover a wide variety of cinematic genres, including epic, martial arts, action, thriller, comedy, and romantic drama. We will also play and analyze video games that use China as a setting. The broadcast of the Beijing Olympics will be one element of our television unit.
-
4.00 Credits
Course examines the histories, presents, and futures of digital media, particularly video games, computer generated images (CGI), and the Internet (including convergences with the media of sound recording, radio, television, and film). One of the underlying concepts we will explore is the relationship between digital media and globalization. We will also investigate how communities are constructed and transformed by their participation in digital media. Some experience with media studies is helpful but not required.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|