Digital Studies Certificate Program | Northwestern SPS - Northwestern School of Professional Studies

The early twenty-first century has witnessed the rise of always-on computing, a distinctive digital media ecology defined by smartphones, social media, and the tacit assumption of life lived on the basis of ubiquitous wireless networks. This same moment has also witnessed an incredible explosion of new networked genres. These genres include animated GIFs, memes, selfies, supercuts, podcasts, vaporwave, ASMR videos, likes, comments, and much else. This seminar is devoted to studying these new forms collectively and individually as aesthetic symptoms of a rapidly changing historical present in the overdeveloped west. While not framed as an introduction to digital media studies or digital aesthetics, this seminar will be taught with the consideration that it will function most likely in this way for most students. Our approach will be to privilege artistic negotiations with new networked genres. Our guiding principle will be that artistic texts offer especially rich reflexive occasions for studying the overwhelmingly non-reflexive aesthetics of always-on computing. We will often pair theoretical texts and work in digital media studies that will grant us a working vocabulary for gaining traction on a number of feelings and ideas: from creepiness and A E S T H E T I C to ambivalence, lethargy, boredom, mindfulness, and touch, as well as things like big data, post-internet art, fake news and the decline of symbolic efficiency, and vulnerability. Authors to be read will likely include Berlant, Ngai, Butler, Richmond, Dean, Cohen, Frosh, and Hu among others. Artists will likely include Dennis Cooper, Allie Brosh, Mary Bond, Jennifer Proctor, Elisa Giardina Papa, Eric Fleischauer and Jason Lazarus, Frances Stark, Faith Holland, Miranda July, and others. (This course may count towards the American Studies, Digital Studies, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may count towards the Film, Literature and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

This course introduces students to graduate level work in literary and cultural analysis. The course draws its materials from the last hundred years of theoretical/critical writing on literature and other forms of cultural production such as films, political tracts, sermons, comics, games, rituals, architecture, blogs, podcasts and much else. We will examine a select set of theoretical positions and how they imagine and configure their objects of study, and devise methods and protocols for interpreting those objects (literary texts and cultural practices/artifacts). Such a theoretical/critical pedagogical approach poses and explores, among other things, the following questions: How is a literary text/cultural artifact isolated from or understood in relation to its social and historical context? What is the relationship between geopolitics and literature? How does the history of technologies of reading (and looking) relate to the texts and artifacts themselves? What is the status of literature in the digital age? Readings are drawn from literary theory, philosophy, film and media studies, and the humanistic social sciences. Specifically, we will focus on the literary/cultural theory and critical practice of the following thinkers/scholars: Clifford Geertz, Raymond Williams, Lauren Berlant, Jacques Rancière, Pierre Bourdieu, Fredric Jameson, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Edward Said, and David Damrosch. (This course is a core requirement for MALS and MALit students. Students in the creative writing programs may also take this course to fulfill a literature or elective requirement.)

This course, required of all MALIT and MALS students (but open to any interested graduate student) offers an introduction to literary and critical theory, as well as key works of literature, poetry, and film. It considers the relation between art, culture, and society as it has been conceived, problematized and reconceived over time. Centering on the nexus of questions and problems that have converged around the concept of truth and its relation to fiction, the course asks: How do works of art and cultural productions form and challenge the foundational truths of the societies in which they emerge and intervene? Students will become familiar with various critical perspectives, considering approaches based on class, race, gender and sexuality. Drawn from philosophy, literature, and cultural studies, the readings will introduce students to key thinkers including Plato, Nietzsche, Freud, Beauvoir, Fanon, Deleuze, and Rancière. The course will also prepare students for graduate work in literary and cultural studies with a focus on academic genres of writing and research methods.

How do we better understand the conjuncture of digital technologies and the humanities? What kinds of thinking, research, teaching, politics, and cultural analysis can the digital enhance? How, in turn, do the fields that constitute the humanities (history, literary and language studies, philosophy, art history, musicology, cultural anthropology, media studies, etc.) offer guidance and grounding in today's wireless world? This course introduces students to the emerging field of critical digital studies, which looks at the intersection of digital technology and the humanities. Through a blending of weekly online engagements and three, Saturday afternoon face-to-face seminars, we address topics such as: what is the history of both the humanities and digital approaches to it as an interdisciplinary project? How can we address humanities questions today through new tactics of computational study found in informatics, statistical analysis, data visualization, and "big data" approaches? What new modes of publishing and scholarly communication do digital technologies make possible (multimedia presentation, podcasts, video, visualization, etc.)? How do we understand the ethics and politics of the digital world (surveillance, open source, net neutrality, sustainability, power)? Each week, students conduct readings and viewings, explore case studies, and complete online experiments. We pursue vigorous online discussion and convene in person for a seminar three times over the course of the quarter. Students pursue a final digital project in consultation with the instructor and in relation to individual interests and pursuits (graduate work, professional interests, digital humanities methodologies). Weekly topics include: digital annotation and database construction for close reading; "distant reading" tactics; digital mapping and timeline building; data and archives; network analysis; glitching and deformance for hermeneutic interpretation; and platforms and social media for humanities inquiry.

Black political activism in the city of Chicago has historically been a multi-varied phenomenon. Prominent and ordinary Black Chicagoans have responded to institutional or structural racism, specific racial incidents or problems impacting the African American community through organizational efforts and the power of the community. This course will explore ten historical incidents in which Black Chicagoans organized to make change. “Political activism” is loosely defined here and does not just mean running for public office. We will specifically look at Ida B. Wells’ fight against the horrors of lynching and her efforts to organize Black Chicago women, Robert Abbott’s creation and management of the Chicago Defender and his founding of Black Chicago legacy events such as the Bud Billiken parade, Carl Augustus Hansberry’s fight against restrictive covenants in the city and the impact that it had on his daughter Lorraine’s artistry, the organizational efforts of CORE (Congress of Racial Equity) and other entities to fight school segregation in the city in the early 1960s, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s work in Chicago in 1966 and the creation of the Chicago Freedom Movement, Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers’ work in Chicago in the late 1960s and the war against them by both the Daley Administration and the FBI, Harold Washington’s political career and his Mayorship in the 1980s, Black Chicago AIDS activism in the 1990s and current efforts to fight the disease, the careers of Toni Preckwinkle and Lori Lightfoot and the role of Black women in Chicago politics, and the formation of the Black Lives Matter movement and its achievements in the city of Chicago. Students will conduct an original research project this semester, using primary resources from the Vivian G. Harsh Collection at the Carter G. Woodson Regional Library, the collections at the main Chicago Public Library, the resources of the Chicago History Museum or the collections of the Gerber-Hart Library. (This course may count towards the American Studies, Chicago Studies, History or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies program. This course may count towards the American Literature, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature program. It may also count as an elective in the creative writing program. Additionally, this course may count towards certain certificates of graduate studies.)

This course surveys the major aesthetic, political, economic, social, and cultural developments of the African American population in the city of Chicago from its founding by Jean Baptiste du Sable, an African American man, to the present day. This course will consider the role of black Chicagoans in the 19th century, through the Civil War, Gilded Age, Progressive Era, World War I, Chicago Race Riot of 1919, World War I and the Great Depression, the Civil Rights movement, the 1970s and 1980s up to the present day. Special emphasis will be placed upon the racial segregation of Chicago, the Black Panthers, and the relationship between the Black Chicago police and the Chicago Police Department. We will be also be exploring Black Chicago outside of the classroom. Analysis of primary source documentation of the African American press will be included in this course. (This course may count towards the American Studies, Chicago Studies, History or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies program. This course may count towards the American Literature, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature program. It may also count as an elective in the creative writing program. Additionally, this course may count towards certain certificates of graduate studies.)

Retrospectatorship is a way of negotiating the history of Hollywood through contemporary practices of spectatorship and the identities and cultural politics we now bring to our viewing of the past. Through a contemporary lens, we often view screen personalities, performances, dialogue, relationships, music, and even glances as “queer.” This course will negotiate American film and television from 1930-1990 in an attempt to “make sense” of a cultural product. We will theorize on meanings of queerness and how this concept colors our notion of gay and lesbian spectatorship. We will also theorize on whether LGBTQ+ and/or straight audiences of the past “read” queerness into a film/program that contemporary audiences might readily identify as such. We will examine the relationship of political culture to the timeframe in which films/programs were produced and the impact that this culture may have had on what was “allowed” and what was “read” into such forms of media. (This course may count towards the American Studies, History, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may count towards the Film, Literature and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

This blended online/face-to-face course will survey a range of ideas, attitudes, and ideologies about the human body as represented in literary texts of the western European Renaissance, with a concentration on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Topics of particular attention will include the four humors, medical dissection, sex and gender, race, the grotesque body, the body in pain, the Eucharist, and the animal body. To learn about these diverse topics, we will read and analyze a wide variety of materials, including Renaissance poetry, plays, medical texts, and works of visual art; contemporary works of literary criticism; and contemporary literary theory. In addition to reading assignments, students will contribute to online discussion boards and submit videos, recording their responses to the readings in both written and oral form. The culmination of the course will take the form of a mini-conference at which students will present their final papers and entertain questions about their original research.

(This course may count towards the British Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master's in literature program. It may count towards the Digital Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies program. It may also count as a literature course or elective in graduate writing programs. Additionally, it may count towards certificates of graduate studies. Please note, this course is a hybrid which will meet in person on April 6, May 11, and June 8).

This course will be devoted to an intense engagement with one of the major figures in the history of literature, Marcel Proust, and to his In Search of Lost Time, which remains a crucial text in the development of modern thought. The focus will be on four volumes of the Search: Swann's Way, Within a Budding Grove, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Time Regained. We will explore Proust's reinvention of the novel as a form in relation to a number of Proustian problems and themes: his analyses of desire, perversion and sexuality; his reflections on the nature of time and memory; and his exploration of the relationship of art to life. We will also consider Proust's powers as a satirist and critic of ideology, who mercilessly dismantled the individual and collective illusions of his contemporaries. (This course may count towards the Comparative and World Literature or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature program. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies program. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program. Additionally, this course may count towards certificates of graduate studies.)

We will examine the central role played by the city in inventing the forms for representing modern life, beginning with Paris (sometimes called the "capital of the 19th Century" because of its central place in the elaboration of the new narrative and cultural forms of industrial civilization) and then expanding our focus to include New York and Los Angeles as privileged spaces where a "culture industry" becomes both the producer and the subject matter of literature and film. We will begin by examining the tensions between realist and mythic representations of the modern city in such writers as Balzac and Baudelaire, as well as the city as a site for the invention of "modern myths" expressing the utopian and dystopian aspects of modern life in the work of surrealists such as Breton and Aragon. We will then go on to explore how these approaches are taken up by classic Hollywood cinema in the 1930s (notably in such popular genres as the musical and the gangster film). But we will also see how these same problems are ultimately reinvented, in the second half of the 20th century, in a postmodern culture dominated by media images and global cultural flows, giving rise to new social spaces and new forms of mythic and realist narrative. Authors read will include such writers as Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Louis Aragon, André Gide, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, and Don DeLillo. We will also discuss films by such directors as Raoul Walsh, Mark Sandrich, Jean-Luc Godard, Ridley Scott, and Michael Haneke.

Note: This course meets weekly online.

(This course counts toward the American Studies, Digital Studies or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies program. This course may count towards the American Literature, Comparative and World Literature, Film, Literature and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature program. It may also count as an elective in the creative writing program.)

Alfred Hitchcock, in his long career, arguably brought cinematic language to its most sophisticated level; and not coincidentally, he was greatly influenced by both surrealism and psychoanalysis. As I wrote in my book on Breaking Bad, “ Alfred Hitchcock . . .orchestrates the system of looks (via framing, editing, camera movement) in such a way as to produce an uneven distribution of knowledge among the various characters and the spectator. Not only does this create Hitchcock’s trademark suspense, but it also produces a cinematic world in which every action is potentially deceptive or revelatory and thus must always be interpreted. This move toward infinite interpretation (“terminable or interminable”) is what aligns Hitchcock’s work so neatly with psychoanalysis . . .” In this course, each week we will explore one basic psychoanalytic concept in conjunction with one Hitchcock film for which that concept provides an exemplary point of entry to understanding. The weekly readings will be a mix of psychoanalytic essays, and film scholarship on the works, especially focusing on the queer theoretical approaches to Hitchcock’s work. Weekly topics and films will include: 1. The unconscious / Shadow of a Doubt; 2. The symptom / Rope; 3. Identification / Fantasy: Rear Window; 4/ The Imaginary / Rebecca; 5/ The Symbolic / North by Northwest; 6/ The real / Psycho; 7/ The death drive / Vertigo; 8/ Jouissance / The Birds; 9/ The sexual relation / Marnie.

(This course may count towards the Film, Literature and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the Master of Arts in Literature and Advanced Graduate Study Certificate programs. This course may count towards the American Studies, Digital Studies, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies and Advanced Graduate Study Certificate programs. This course may also count as an elective or for literature credit in the Master of Arts in Writing and Fine Arts Prose and Poetry programs.)