Spring

This seminar will give advanced students a chance to pursue research and criticism over a range of periods and objects of study. The broad topic will be the theory and practice of the sentimental over the course of nearly three centuries, on stage, page, and screen. In addition to looking at the philosophical treatments of the sentiments in Shaftesbury, Hume, and Smith, and critical discussions of the "sentimental" as a literary mode (in Schiller), we will look at sentimental comedy, sentimental fiction, and sentimental cinema. Since the sentimental is inevitably a mode of mediated affective exchange, the place of the media and of translation between media, will have special importance in the course. Primary works by such figures Steele, Sterne, MacKenzie, Charlotte Smith, William Hall Brown, the poets of sensibility and Romanticism, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dickens, D.W. Griffith, Frank Capra, Douglas Sirk, and others. Secondary works from the burgeoning field of "sensibility studies." Seminar presentation and paper.

COVA 10100 or 10200; or consent of instructor. A camera and a light meter are required. Using photographic materials, black & white or color, students focus on a set of issues and ideas that expand upon their experience and knowledge, and that have particular relevance to them. All course work is directed toward the production of a cohesive body of photographic work. An investigation of contemporary and historic art issues informs the students' exploration as does extensive darkroom work, gallery visits,critical readings, group and individual critiques, and presentations. Course can be taken several times as color and/or black and white, with series of projects developing and changing. Lab fee $60.

When movie characters break into song, they express emotion and create community, comment on everyday life and escape or transcend it. Musicals straddle the utopian world of the screen and the popular, lay performances of high schools and community theaters. This course considers the genre’s formal, cultural, social, and performative dimensions (from its conventions of sound, dance, and color, to its representations of race, ethnicity, and cultural contact). Films will range from early American and European musicals (The Jazz Singer, Le Million, Three from the Gas Station, and Volga Volga) to Yiddish and immigrant musical theater (The Dybbuk and West-Side Story) to classic Hollywood films (Shall We Dance, Showboat, A Star Is Born, Oklahoma, and Singing in the Rain) to revisionist music films (Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Window Shopping, Killer of Sheep, Latcho Drom, Buena Vista Social Club).

The animator of Prague, Jan Svankmajer, is one of the greatest living advocates of Surrealism as a modus vivendi. The course studies intensively his life work, from films shorts such as Dimensions of Dialogue to feature films like the recent Conspirators of Pleasure and Little Otik, to his tactile poems and collages. We also read interviews with Svankmajer and his colleagues, essays on contemporary Surrealism, and critical works on the theory of the neo-avant-garde and the cultural situation of avant-garde art in East/Central Europe. The course is conducted in the style of a seminar with a strong focus on discussion and the requirement of one final paper or project.

The history and aesthetics of radical interpretation of canonical works in theater, opera, film. Examination of aesthetic tracts (e.g. Appia, Artaud, Brecht, Peter Brooks), theory (Barthes, Derrida, E. Diamond, Foucault), as well as modern forays into radical interpretation (e.g. Derek Jarman/Marlowe’s Edward II, Patrice Chereau/Wagner’s Ring, Peter Sellers/Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Baz Luhrmann’s _William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet_, Sally Potter’s Thriller, and recent work by the Wooster Group).

Through the films and written work of Kenneth Macpherson and the Pool Group, Jean Cocteau, Parker Tyler (and Charles Henri Ford), Joseph Cornell and others, we will construct a study of queer avant garde practice and content between WWI and WWII. We will also survey literary, artistic, religious, psychoanalytic, and other texts, which influenced these artists experimental practice and understandings of queer subjectivity.

The films of Rohmer will be studied as a new "Comedie humaine," offering a rich gallery of the faces of France from the 60s to the 90s, from "La Collectionneuse" to "Conte d’automne..." and, according to his first reviews in "Cahiers du cinema," as a cinematographic work which could rediscover in its own way the liberty of a literary creation (especially in "adaptations" like "La Marquise d’O" and "Perceval le Gallois"). This course will be taught in English.

This seminar will discuss the ambiguous and protean inheritance that film as a popular form received from 19th century stage melodrama. The stage tradition of melodrama, both in terms of play texts, and performance and staging practices, will be surveyed with readings of 19th century melodramas and descriptions of their staging. Peter Brooks' discussion of "The Melodramatic Imagination" will be crucial to the course, both as an account of the 19th century tradition and as a claim for melodrama as a form that moves across genres. The claim by scholars that 19th century melodramatic stage had inherent ties to cinema as posed by Vardac and critiqued by the recent work of Brewster and Jacobs will also be considered. Melodrama as a form in silent cinema, and as a genre of sound cinema, including its particular relation to the women's film will also be considered, with writings by Mulvey, Doane and others. Films will be screened by Griffith, Feuillade, Sjostrom, Hitchcock, Vidor, Ophuls and Sirk.

A study of the history and culture of Italian-Americans through filmic and literary representations. Writers include Helen Barolini, Tina De Rosa, Giose Rimanelli, and Ed McBain (Savatore Lambino); directors include Coppola, Scorsese, Savoca, Cimino, and Ferrara.

Consent of instructor. Please register by faculty section.