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This interdisciplinary course provides students with the opportunity to explore the cultural, political, and economic conditions faced by peoples of the Caribbean. The region is defined by its geography, common historical experiences, such as slavery and the triangular trade, participation in the global community, labor migration, cultural identities, the intermixing of diverse ethnic and racial groups, and nation-states that have sought sovereignty. Students will gain an understanding of the diversity of the Caribbean, and the factors that shape Caribbean identity and culture past and present.
Students will wrestle with some of the theoretical challenges of imagining a cohesive Caribbean: What unites these different countries? What unique histories have produced very different cultures in the Caribbean? How do people in these different nation-states define their own experiences and identities? And what are the ethical questions that emerge out of policies for globalized development today? We will examine the meanings of race, mixed race, and gender identity in Caribbean society, particularly around the contested experiences of Afro-Caribbean people. Looking at many new texts in the field, we will explore economies of tourism, sex tourism, cultural and economic remittances, cultural production, and post-colonial popular culture through literature, film and video, music, fine arts as well as the transmission of culture across borders—particularly through social media. We will also examine the many economic forces of globalization, including CARICOM (the Caribbean Community and Common Market), NAFTA, and CAFTA for their impact on the people in the region.
This course will include important perspectives from a range of disciplines that intersect with cultural studies, such as anthropology, history, sociology, queer studies, gender studies, transnational feminist cultural studies, comparative literature, film studies and the digital humanities. *Students may petition for Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies course credit.
In this course, we will analyze and respond to black female adolescent protagonists’ experiences of race, gender, and class and national identity. Focusing on narratives of the lives of adolescent girls and young women of African descent, we will explore themes such as transnational identity, migration, labor, agency, rebellion, disability, colonialism, blackness, colorism, racial ambiguity, gender ambiguity, queer identity, sexuality and sexual violence.
Undergraduates should come to this course with some exposure to issues of gender, race, and feminist theory. Students will develop close reading skills with which to analyze literature and film—from short stories and short films to novels and feature length films and documentaries—and will learn to produce critical writing about these types of texts. With an intersectional lens of analysis, students will identify and respond to tropes of blackness and femaleness that these authors and filmmakers both rely on and push back against in their portrayals of the significance of being young, black and female in many different contexts in the world.
How many ways can filmmakers depict young King Arthur withdrawing the sword from the stone?? Answer: MANY! This course will compare modern translations of literary texts written in the medieval period (13th-century King Arthur narratives, Werewolf narratives, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Robin Hood ballads, Beowulf) to film and television adaptations of this material (Excalibur and other Arthurian films, five Beowulf adaptations, five SGGK adaptations including The Green Knight [2021], and various Robin Hood films and TV series). Course goals include: learning how to perform close reading of the words that comprise medieval literary texts; learning how to “read” the components of cinematography: mise en scene, camera shots, dialogue, lighting, sound, musical soundtrack, costume, props, casting, etc.; sharpening critical thinking.
Cinematic materials include silent films, animation, Hollywood blockbuster feature films, and TV series. CORE Requirement Satisfied: Language, Philosophy & Culture
Who deserves credit for making a film? Is it the director? Screenwriter? The star who carries it, or the studio and producer who fund and realize it? At the Oscars, these various roles are discrete categories, but cinema is an expensive and labor-intense product that depends on many contributors and is vulnerable to countless conditions. These exigencies make film a notably challenging medium in which to identify authorship. While a novel, painting, or even a contemporary song usually has a single or limited set of creators, movies defy our traditional notions of solitary, unique genius. These ambiguities of authorship in cinema, moreover, have only grown more complex with digital and online media, as fan culture, narrowcast platforms, and adjacent and spinoff industries like gaming and retail goods transform the origins of narrative content.
This version of ENGL 4373: Film, Text, and Politics explores questions of authorship in film history and theory. Combining analytic readings alongside a selection of narrative film, this course explores Hollywood history and practice, art and film criticism, and new media theory.
Who deserves credit for making a film? Is it the director? Screenwriter? The star who carries it, or the studio and producer who fund and realize it? At the Oscars, these various roles are discrete categories, but cinema is an expensive and labor-intense product that depends on many contributors and is vulnerable to countless conditions. These exigencies make film a notably challenging medium in which to identify authorship. While a novel, painting, or even a contemporary song usually has a single or limited set of creators, movies defy our traditional notions of solitary, unique genius. These ambiguities of authorship in cinema, moreover, have only grown more complex with digital and online media, as fan culture, narrowcast platforms, and adjacent and spinoff industries like gaming and retail goods transform the origins of narrative content. The tensions surrounding film authorship are particularly obvious now, months into crippling writers and actors strike whose effects are being felt by workers, creatives and ancillary industries.
This version of ENGL 4373: Film, Text, and Politics explores questions of authorship in film history and theory. Combining analytic readings alongside a selection of narrative film, this course explores Hollywood history and practice, art and film criticism, and new media theory.
Requirements: Midterm and final, as well as 1-2 classroom presentations. As with the assigned reading, students must view films independently outside of class. Course also includes an optional creative final project.
This course is an investigation into the concept of the “ghost” as a figure that emerges and exposes the interstices between material/immaterial, real/imaginary, private/public, the past/present, right/wrong, rational/irrational, same/other, and further constructed binaries. This course will tackle the ghost as a figure of haunting while also questioning the very real material effects of embodiment, affect, and other modes of disruption that occur with the ghost’s emergence on the page and in our historical present. Specifically, then, this course will tackle the figure of the “ghost” in relation to questions and theories of racialization, spatiality, sexuality, history, embodiment, and affect theory.
Course materials draw on a wide range of disciplines and approaches including, but not limited to, psychoanalytic theory, black feminist theory, gender and sexuality studies, monster theory, literary theory, and sociology. Students will be asked to engage with short stories, novels, film, and television.
This course engages with 20th and 21st century films about the ancient Greeks and Romans. Using each movie as a window, we will look at history from two perspectives: 1) the historians and writers from the ancient world, and 2) the modern filmmaker in Hollywood and abroad. This course will cover the historical events and ancient primary texts inspiring each movie, as well as modern scholarship questioning why the ancient world has been such a popular topic for modern audiences.
Our goal is not to decide who got history “right” or “wrong,” but to realize that history is a story told in a context. We will examine who tells this story and what underlining motives and factors shape their narrative. By the end of this course, you will have the tools to synthesize, analyze, and compare historical accounts, whether they are told in writing or through film.
This course is taught concurrently with ITAL 6306 Advanced Italian Cinema and WCL 3367 National Cinema in Global Perspective.
Italian filmmakers and actors have produced an impressive number of films that have influenced and continue to influence the cinema of the entire world, from Europe to the United States, and from Latin America to Asia. This course introduces the students to crucial works from the directors of the Neorealist and post-Neorealist age up to the present time. The course focuses particularly on films that had an impact outside of Italy and films by Italian directors looking at the world and shooting film that address other culture.
An introduction to contemporary trends in film theory, with focus on the theories of the "gaze." Films from Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the U.S., and the Middle East will be analyzed.