Film, Literature, and Visual Culture Certificate Program Overview, Northwestern University School of Professional Studies - 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.)

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. (This course may count towards the American Studies, Chicago Studies, Digital Studies, History, Religious and Ethical Studies, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the American Literature, British Literature, Comparative and World Literature, Film, Literature and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course is required of MALS and COAGS students, specializing in Digital Studies. But any interested graduate student may take the course as an elective. Please note, this course is a hybrid which will meet in person on January 13, February 10, and March 17.)

This course approaches literary studies on a graduate level. We will examine the act of reading and literary interpretation, including various methodologies for producing and documenting literary criticism. We will also work to understand a range of literary theories and their suitable deployment through encounters with selected American realist, modernist, and postmodernist works by authors including Whitman, Twain, Cather, Dreiser, Hemingway, Eliot, Morrison, and DeLillo. We will survey various schools of criticism including Marxism, New Criticism, structuralism and post-structuralism, gender and queer theory, cultural studies, and the New York Intellectuals. (This course is required of all MALit students within the first year of study. This course may also count toward the American literature specialization.)

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.)

Literature of Plague and Pandemic

Some forays into fictional narratives are escapist; they allow us an imaginative respite from our daily reality. Other narrative adventures run in the opposite direction: through fiction, they allow us to engage with the difficulties of our present reality with greater insight; acuity; context; and (perhaps most importantly) company, reminding us that we are not the first to face even seemingly unprecedented terrors. This course will look to literary narratives of plague and pandemic as a way to contextualize, historicize, and deepen our comprehension of the way the COVID-19 pandemic has changed our social, economic, cultural, and imaginative realities. Texts may include Boccaccio's Decameron (1348–53); selections from the pamphlets of Thomas Dekker (early 17th century); selections from The Turkish Embassy Letters of Lady Wortley Montagu (1763); Daniel DeFoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722); Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826); Edgar Allan Poe's "Mask of the Red Death" (1842); Jack London's The Scarlet Plague (1912); Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (1912, in translation); Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse (1938); Albert Camus's La Peste (1947, in translation); José Sarmago's Blindness (1995); Yuri Herrera's The Transmigration of Bodies (2016); and Karen Walker Thompson's The Dreamers (2019). (This course may count towards the American Literature, British Literature, Comparative and World Literature, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the American Studies or Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

Note: This course is an online, asynchronous course.

Much recent fiction, film, and theory are concerned with representing the internet and online environments. Sometimes cyberspace is depicted as a continuation of previous media such as television, cinema, or telephone, but often it is envisioned as a new frontier. This course will examine the ways in which digital interfaces appear in cultural discourses. We consider how technological objects and tools participate in shaping elements of our culture that may appear natural, logical, or timeless. Our guiding questions will include the following: In what ways are these narratives shaping collective perceptions of the internet? How have virtual technologies challenged experiences of language, gender, sex, race, ethnicity, and location? We will focus on literary and filmic representations of social networking, gaming, news delivery, and artificial intelligence. Following a Cultural Studies model for inquiry, this course will be text-based with require that you develop close reading strategies, as well as revise your work. (This course may count towards the American Studies, Digital Studies, History, Religious and Ethical Studies, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also 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. But any interested graduate student may take the course as an elective. Please note, this course is a hybrid which will meet in person on January 13, February 10, and March 17.)

The course studies the art, architecture and urbanism of “The Age of Revolution” with heavy emphasis upon artistic and political developments in France, but the German states, England and Spain will also be discussed. The key artistic practices studied in the course are those of David, Goya, Ingres, Daumier, Géricault, Delacroix, Blake and Constable. The rise of major metropolises (London and Paris) and their public and private buildings will likewise be important points of focus. Major themes will be the rise of an art for the public, art and revolution, art and empire, the invention of Orientalism and Romanticism, caricature and the press, new image technologies (including lithography and photography), and the rise of landscape painting and portraiture. (This course may count towards the History or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also 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 engages with narratives, written over roughly a seven-century time frame, beginning more than two thousand years ago, that focus on strange events, strange creatures, human and otherwise, strange places, and strange things. In order to understand texts about anomalies came to be written, what and how they might mean, and why they are significant in the long history of pre-modern Chinese literature, we will read and discuss tales about animals, monsters, ghosts, and barbarians, especially through the lens of the concept of the “foreign.” We will include selections from other contemporary and related sources, when relevant to the overall understanding of the texts under study. As we explore these fascinating materials together, uncovering their richness and complexity, we will in turn address issues such as the place of the fiction in early Chinese literature, religious and folkloric beliefs in demons and the afterlife, immortality, femininity, masculinity, sexuality and their discontents, among other things. In addition to the primary sources, representative theoretical work in the field of early Chinese literature will be incorporated as much as possible. Previous knowledge of early Chinese literature, though helpful, is not required. (This course may count towards the History or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies program. This course may count towards the 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. Additionally, this course may count towards certain certificates of graduate studies.)

Since the age when the maritime explorers searched for a passage to India and a shorter route to the East, Asia has held a fascination for the West and the religions and cultures of Asia have influenced Western literature, philosophy and religion. This course explores some of the classic literature of the Asian religions, Hinduism, Buddhism and Daoism, and also considers some of the ways that this literature has been interpreted in the modern period in both Asian and Western film and literature. Among our readings will be two of the great epics of Hinduism, the Bhagavad Gita and the Ramayana, as well as key writings from the Buddhist tradition, and the Chinese Tao Te Ching (Dao De Jing). We shall also view examples of Asian and Western film and read modern works by authors such as Thoreau, Forster and Kerouac in order to inquire how this Asian literature and its religious themes have been interpreted and re-imagined in the modern period. (This course may count toward the American, World and Comparative literature, or Literature, film, and visual culture specializations in MALit. It may count toward the American studies, History, and Religion and ethical studies specializations in MALS. It may also count toward any of these specialization certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

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.

The “crisis of contemporary masculinity” is routinely discussed in both popular media and academic circles. Due to changing geopolitical and socioeconomic conditions, constructions of American manhood have been reconfigured in the past twenty years. Or have they? This course will examine American manhood and masculinity in the millennial age. Drawing heavily from examples of popular culture such as motion pictures, reality television, men’s magazines, literature and sports, issues that be considered will include body image, race and masculinity, fatherhood, labor, education, the anti-hero in popular culture, sexual fluidity and metrosexuality. Students will read contemporary gender theory and interrogate cinematic, televisual and online representations of masculinity. (This course may count toward the American literature or Literature, film, and visual culture specializations in MALit. It may count toward the American studies specialization in MALS. It may also count toward any of these specialization certificate programs.)

One comes to this course with a willingness to question the relationships between parents and children, beginning with Georgian England and continuing to those of contemporary times, in literature, art and film. While these relationships can be loving, they also can be deeply disturbing, even abusive; in Dame Iris Murdoch's work, for example, the young are often sacrificial lambs for the older generation, sacrificed even to death. Causes of discord between the generations are often more numerous than causes for agreement and harmony. To unpack these relationships and explore these themes, we will read novels, view films and works of art and photography. Some of the work we will examine point out areas of disagreement between parents and children that come with one generation's shock when a child's homosexuality is revealed, as in Nadine Gordimer's The House Gun; political disagreement between generations can be equally difficult in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons; looking at Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, while viewing the photographs he took of the young child he used as the model for Alice can give us another view of adults and children in Victorian England, for example. Our list will be wide-ranging. (This course may count towards the History or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count towards the British Literature, Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

Documentary film has been one of the most acclaimed genres of film since 2000. Numerous documentary films have made valuable political or social statements (Fahrenheit 9/11) while others have simply entertained us (March of the Penguins). What all documentary films do is constrict a vision of reality – whether it is the perspective of a president, the crimes of a serial killer, the lives of a group of penguins or the courage of cancer survivors. We will examine the impact of reality television on the genre. Through the screening of documentaries both within and outside of class, we will consider documentaries as performative acts. Their very fluidity and instability will allow us to examine the differing spectatorial reactions to these films. (This course may count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also 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.)

Fake news” has become one of the most discussed contemporary issues in American culture since the 2016 presidential election. But a firm description of exactly what is “fake news” is lacking. This course will examine this phenomenon. We will begin with an examination of the cultural and political polarization of the United States in the second and third decades of the 21st century. We will then attempt to define “fake news” in its various incarnations and examine how it is both a national and a global phenomenon. We will investigate how “fake news” is not a new construct and we will look at historical examples of it. We will discuss YouTube as it relates to news and cultural production, its political purposes and the rationales for downloading videos on the file sharing service and its relationship to the production of documentary films. The lines between archival material, YouTube and documentary filmmaking has become muddled in the past decade, particularly as it relates to the manipulation of original footage for reasons of political intent. We will also discuss the roles of Instagram, and Clubhouse. Students will complete the course by analyzing a full-length documentary and determine its objectivity, realism, use of archival sources, biases, purposes, and whether if extrapolates “fake news” in its construction. (This course may count towards the American Studies, Digital Studies, History, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies and Advanced Graduate Study Certificate programs. This course may also 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 also count as an elective in the Master of Arts and Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. Please note, this course is a hybrid which will meet in person on three Thursdays throughout the term: 6/23, 7/28, and 8/25.)

Richard J. Daley shaped the city of Chicago, and its region, more than any person in its history. Monumental public-works projects from the expressway system, high-rise public housing, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and O’Hare Airport all were born or came to fruition during his 21 years in office (1955-1976). The North Side Lakefront and the Loop bloomed with high-rises, while many low-rise neighborhoods—-especially on the South and West Sides--fell into disrepair and despair. This seminar will examine the forces in Chicago culture which most shaped Daley-the-Man (the neighborhood of Bridgeport with its parks, bars, and “social and athletic clubs”; the Roman Catholic Church; the Labor movement; the Democratic Party) in order to better understand how, and why, he in turn shaped the city in ways good and bad, which still structure our experience of this place and which helped create Daley-the-Myth. The course will read two biographies of Daley, along with selections from a wide range of scholarship, journalism, poetry, fiction, and visual art depicting Daley. We will also have at least one, and perhaps as many as three, off-site meetings to directly engage with Daley’s Chicago. (This course may count toward the American Literature, Literature, Film, and Visual Culture, and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the Master of Arts in Literature and Advanced Graduate Study Certificate programs. It may count toward the American Studies, Chicago Studies, History, Religious and Ethical Studies, and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies and Advanced Graduate Study Certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

How do media impact our sense of such fundamental concepts as personhood, social life, and time and space? How do new technologies transform sensory experience at different moments in history? This course provides an introduction to the field of theoretical writings within the humanities addressing the nature of media and the role of technology in twentieth- and twenty-first century culture. We will pay close attention to the work of key media theorists, including (but not limited to) Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, and Donna Haraway. We will also analyze works of art, sound, film, and literature in order to catalyze, test, and expand our sense of how media matter. (This course may count towards the History or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also 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 should cause us to seek an answer to the question of whether there is a human compulsion to connect with the divine, to suffer for or with the divine, to question whether women are more willing to accept the suffering that is oftentimes dealt them in a Christ-like way, or to accept sacrifice and suffering as part of their human condition. Through a variety of films and some short novels (the films are mostly foreign, most in English), we will have, it is hoped, lively discussion and much food for thought. The list of films include: Kristin Lavransdatter - Norway; Mariette in Ecstasy - American; Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark - Danish; Mustang - Turkish; Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce - Belgian; and others to be added. (This course may count toward the Film, Literature, and Visual Culture and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the Master of Arts in Literature and Advanced Graduate Study Certificate programs. It may count toward the History, Religious and Ethical Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies and Advanced Graduate Study Certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

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.)

Film noir defies easy characterization; but perhaps this is why, of all the genres of classical Hollywood, noir is the one that seems to speak most closely to us postmoderns. The films to be studied in this course will be divided equally among classical Hollywood noir, neo-noir, and recent examples of noir in international cinema and contemporary television. At the cultural level, the course will focus on two overarching themes: first, the ways in which noir has registered the transformations in urban space as we move from modernity to postmodernity; and second, the ways in which noir has negotiated the racial, sexual, and gendered borders inscribed within the urban fabric. Close attention will be paid to the formal construction of each film—editing, lighting and mise-en-scene, sound—so that students will develop their skills in reading cinematic texts. Likely films include Welles, Touch of Evil; Lang, The Big Heat; Aldrich, Kiss Me Deadly; Polanski, Chinatown; Scorsese, Taxi Driver; Duke, Deep Cover; and others. Readings to include Ed Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity; James Naremore, Film Noir and its Contexts; and a number of articles. (This course may count towards the American Studies or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies program. This course may count towards the American Literature, Film, Literature and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature program. It may also count as a literature requirement or 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.)

In this seminar we will study two landmark novelists whose works still reverberate around the globe: the Irish expatriate James Joyce and the English writer and critic Virginia Woolf (each 1882-1941). Living and writing in a period of accelerating scientific, technological, social, political, and economic change as well as civil and world war, each created radically new narrative forms to register modern time and modern times from the antithetical vantage points, respectively, of colonial Dublin and the imperial London metropolis. Through a selection of each author’s major works, we’ll explore their creative interventions in literary genres (e.g., short story, autobiographical fiction, epic, elegy, the novel) in light of a host of influences; among others, theories of the unconscious and “the psychopathology of everyday life”; scapegoat dynamics in theory and everyday practice; relations among bodies, desire, gender, representational strategies; performance (studied and unconscious) and theatricality; loss and elegy; the power of love; the scalpel of wit; the social life of comedy and humor; the socio-economic sex/gender system, including marriage and prostitution, as keys to political authority; the powers and pleasures of language in their modernist medleys of voices and styles: interior monologue, dialogue, poetry, news, advertising, jokes, parody, obfuscation, song, music, play script, letters, catechism, allusion, citation, non-English words, silence. We will approach these challenging, exhilarating, deeply rewarding books in ways playful and critical, jocoserious and analytic, each of us seeking singular revelations with serious purpose and imaginative freedom.

Requirements: Active, informed participation; short weekly analytic and interpretive exercises; oral presentation; proposal and seminar project.

(This course may count towards the British Literature, Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, Comparative and World Literature, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

Henry James wrote his illustrious fictions at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, just as the technology of cinema was being perfected and its artistic potentials were first realized. To an uncanny degree, James’s central concerns as a writer were also those of cinema: the mysteries of personality and behavior; the tension between the old world and the new; the contrasting traditions of Europe and America; the revelation of character through objects, environments, and reckless impulses; and the various problems posed across the social ladder by sex, gender, money, death, and the supernatural. Comparing some of James’s short stories and novels to their film adaptations shows us how his plots and themes have been differently understood over time, and how film’s capabilities for rendering psychology, conflict, love, horror, aesthetics, and thought have also evolved. Students will learn key techniques of film analysis, will absorb some core ideas and innovations in the work of a dazzling author, and will braid these two areas of knowledge in their own sophisticated essays. (This course may count toward the American literature, British literature, or Literature film and visual culture specialization in MALit or the American studies specialization in MALS.)

This course will trace the development of the English novel from travel narrative, Gothic and sentimental fiction to the realism of Jane Austen. We will read selections from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), usually considered the first English novel, and from 18th-C. Gothic and sentimental fiction to compare these to Austen’s realistic comedies of manners. The course will focus on Austen’s novels, from her parody of Gothic and sentimental romances in Northanger Abbey to her satire of British society in Persuasion. We will also look at the enduring popularity and afterlife of Jane Austen’s oeuvre and current “Austenmania” with its plethora of film adaptations, sequels, and parodies, including a more serious treatment of Austen’s fictional world in Jo Baker’s 2013 novel Longbourn, the story of Pride and Prejudice told from the perspective of the servants. (This course may count towards the British Literature, 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 towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

This course 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 focusing on New York and Los Angeles as privileged spaces where a "culture industry" then becomes both the producer and the subject matter of literature and film. Students examine 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 Aragon. Students will also 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) and 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, which will give rise to new social spaces and new utopias but will consequently also give rise to new forms of mythic and realist narrative. Authors read will include such writers as Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Louis Aragon, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, and Don DeLillo. We will also discuss films by such directors as Raoul Walsh, Lloyd Bacon, Busby Berkeley, Jean-Luc Godard, Ridley Scott, Jim Jarmusch, and Michael Haneke. Counts toward the American Literature and the Comparative & World Literature specializations. (This course may count towards the Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, American Literature, Comparative and World Literature, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the Master of Arts in Literature and Advanced Graduate Study Certificate programs. It may also count towards the American Studies, Digital Studies, or Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies and Advanced Graduate Study Certificate programs. This course may also count as an elective in the Master of Arts and Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. Please note, this course is a hybrid which will meet in person on three Saturdays throughout the term: June 30, July 28, and September 1.)

This course will explore the place of film in postmodern culture. We will examine how the aesthetic and narrative forms of film have been reinvented by postmodern film makers, as well as the ways in which the most important of these recent films have (from a variety of ideological and aesthetic perspectives) contested the dominant culture of postmodernity. The course will begin by providing the conceptual and historical background for an understanding of postmodernism, through an analysis of a number of key films of the ’60s and ‘70s. Some of the interrelated themes of these films (including works by such directors as Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Altman, Jacques Tati, Ridley Scott, and Chris Marker) are the new experiences of urban space characteristic of postmodern culture; the new cultural forms associated with the triumph of consumerism; and the emergence of a new global culture of the image. We will then explore a number of problems central to current debates about the nature and limits of postmodernism—such as the place of dystopian and utopian fantasy in postmodernity; the possibilities of and alternatives to realist representation of postmodern experience; the representation of new forms of sexual and ethnic identity and the intertwining individual and collective histories in an age of globalization—through discussions of cinematic works by directors from Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia, including such film makers as Alain Resnais, Gianni Amelio, Patricio Guzmàn, Quentin Tarantino, Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg, Jim Jarmusch, Abderrahmane Sissako, Agnès Varda, Todd Haynes, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Quentin Tarantino, Raoul Ruiz and Tsai Ming-Liang. (This course may count towards the Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, Comparative and World Literature, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. NOTE: This course will be taught remotely on Zoom each week during the time designated.)

What beckons people to the metropolis? What draws crowds to the cinema? Why should we think "cinema" in tandem with "the city"? Departing from these questions, we will analyze relations between cinema and the city, using Germany as our geopolitical launching pad. Drawing on a range of classic and lesser-known (but mesmerizing) films from the Weimar period onward, we will visit the real and imagined cities of Germany, evaluating how space and social relationships are imagined in the German metropolis and, in some cases, between a German and an “extra-territorial” city. Our travels will take us to the cities of Hamburg and Istanbul, Frankfurt and Jakarta, and Berlin and New York, among other locations. Critical questions steering our cosmopolitan navigations include: how does urban space influence how we think about forms of national, gendered, ethnic, sexual, and class identity? How does the historical network of social relationships in the urban setting--and in cinematic form--organize our view of political and social networks we now inhabit? How should we analyze urban economies in the context of cinema? Approaches to these questions will include: formal and aesthetic analysis of film and the historical background and cultural context of the films under consideration (including, Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927); Fritz Lang's M (1931); Eduard von Borsody's Wunschkonzert (1940), Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), Fatih Akin's Head-On (2004), and Christoph Hochhäusler's The City Below (2010). These films will be considered in tandem with a selection of classical texts on modernity, mass society, and theories of space. (This course may count towards the Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, Comparative and World Literature, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

While science fiction has often been thought of as an English-language genre, in fact Latin America has its own rich history of science fiction writing. This course offers an introduction to science fiction literature and film in Latin America. Beginning with a critical definition of the genre (and the ways in which it differs from “magical realism” and the fantastic), we will examine some early examples of science fiction in Spanish language literature by writers such as Eduardo Holmberg and Eduardo Urzaiz. We will then read some now-classic texts that can be considered science fiction, such as Adolfo Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel, Jorge Luis Borges’ “Tlön, Urqbar, Orbis Tertius,” and the absurdist short stories of Mexican writer Juan José Arreola. Finally, we will trace the regional shift from science fiction to cyberpunk through texts like Cuban writer Yoss’s Planet for Rent and films such as Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer, looking at the ways in which recent Latin American and Latina/o writers and directors have expanded on and experimented with this sub-genre. As we read, we will seek to understand how science fiction navigates the divide between "popular" and "elite" literature, its function as a form of social criticism, and the ways in which writers and filmmakers have used science fiction to interrogate social categories such as race, class, and gender. We will also ask what might make science fiction from this region different from science fiction produced elsewhere. (This course may count towards the Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, Comparative and World Literature, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

This seminar is about slums, as much about their socio-cultural dynamics as about their cinematic representations. Slums are proliferating across the globe at an extraordinarily rapid rate. Today more than one billion people live in slums and that number is expected to double by 2030. By 2050, two thirds of the world’s population will be living in cities and a vast majority of them in slums or slum-like-conditions. We do, in fact, as Mike Davis puts it, live on a planet of slums. Life in the slums as described and analyzed both in scholarly studies and in popular media is one of the most dynamic points of intersection of the good, the bad, and the ugly. The material conditions of life, especially sanitary conditions that severely compromise public health, are palpably “ugly.” The “bad” is pervasive in slums: crime and corruption, violence and intimidation, sheer poverty, inequality and injustice point to the general abuse of human beings by the members of the same species. On the other hand, there is also much that is “good” in slums: resilience in the face of adversity, community spirit, creative and economic use of scarce resources etc. Without celebrating the slums, there is much to learn from slums for the society at large. This seminar is not just about films about slums. Slum Cinema is also not a film course as such. We will be using the cinematic representations of all sorts (feature films, documentaries, TV mini-series etc.) to examine the slum as a space of life and work of billions of people across the globe. This seminar will focus on the fact that a significant part of creative cultural production (films, TV series, music, novels, comics etc) takes place against backdrop of slums or slum life. Films to include: City of God (Brazil, 2002), Slumdog Millionaire (India, 2008), District 9 (South Africa location, 2009), Ali Zaoua (Morocco, 2000), Tsotsi (South Africa 2005), Gangs of New York (USA, 2002) and La Haine (France, 1995). The seminar has a very explicit global focus as it seeks to juxtapose cinematic representations from varied national/cultural terrains, from both from the advanced countries and from the developing countries of the global south. (This course may count towards the Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, Comparative and World Literature, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

This seminar explores the writings and the visual work of women artists associated with the European and American Avant-Garde movements in the early 20th century. We explore how in the arts and major genres of writing, women artists helped develop these movements' radical poetics and critical outlooks on societal normativity. By focusing on this production, we bring under scrutiny both the destabilization of the category "woman" as a primary site of retrospective emphasis and the gender biases in the constitution of the modernist canon, in order to explore the entanglement among socialist, anarchists and anti-colonial groups rather than the singular. How do these artists conceive of their written work and artistic processes as interventions into social, political, and historical realities? How does their subjective view those realities provide an account of the determinations of their gender and sexuality? We will examine avant-garde's experimental forms of writing and visual culture in their fractures, collaged, or inhuman representations of modern personhood as their offered a new feminist and anarchic language. Readings and topics will include: Suffragettes' Manifestos; Valentine de Saint Point's Manifesto of The Futurist Woman and Futurist Manifesto of Lust; Mina Loy, Georgia Douglas Johnson and Nancy Cunard's poetry and chronicles; Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, Norah Lange and Silvina Ocampos' surrealist short stories and visual art; Nella Larsen's Passing and Josephine Baker's performances; Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes' experimental prose and Sophie Taeuber-Arp's abstract painting; Bauhaus women photography and experimental autobiography.

The 1960s and 1970s produced a wealth of new literature, usually labeled "postmodernist," that is innovative, challenging, and fun to read. In this class we will discuss novels and short stories of this period from the United States, Latin America, Asia, and Europe, in order to explore the characteristics of postmodern fiction—fabulation, playfulness, parody, and self-consciousness—and the cultural and social conditions that produced it. Participants will learn the basic concepts and examples of literary postmodernism and will have the opportunity to research and present their findings on other literature and fields of culture of the period (such as art and architecture). Students will hone research and critical skills in discussing these forms of experimental fiction in the context of their times.

Readings may include: John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse; Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony; Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire; Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman; Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude; Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children, Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler.

(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.)

Note: This course meets weekly online.

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.)

Courses in literature-to-film adaptation often emphasize canonical and historically distant works by such authors as Shakespeare, Austen, or the Victorians. This course instead centers on contemporary novels and short stories as well as their film adaptations, mostly but not exclusively produced in Hollywood. Beyond simply comparing these texts in terms of story or style, we will ask how literary fiction has itself changed in a 21st-century media environment where film rights are often sold before novels get finished, and where financing, production, media circulation, and creative processes constantly change. We will read American stories that have been adapted differently by U.S. and international filmmakers, and we will contemplate the politics that appear to motivate which texts get adapted -- and which themes are considered "literary," "prestigious," or globally marketable in an era when comic books, video games, and prior movies inspire more adaptations than do recent novels or plays. Along the way, we will master key skills of formal analysis and thematic argument regarding both literature and film. Key texts are likely to include "Brokeback Mountain" (Proulx), Children of Men (James), No Country for Old Men (McCarthy), "So Much Water So Close to Home" (Carver), Oil! (Sinclair), Atonement (McEwan), "Lust, Caution" (Zhang), The Reader (Schlink), and Persepolis (Satrapi), as well as the movies derived from these texts.  (This course may count towards the American literature, British Literature, Comparative and World Literature, 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 also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

This course looks at the way in which U.S. writers imagined both the domestic scene and the greater world in the wake of the rising status of the United States as a global power. In the post-WWII period, writers rethought many of the presumptions about America’s place in the world and revised earlier narratives about Americans abroad and internationalism. In the twenty-first century, those presumptions changed again, both because of the changing geopolitical status of the U.S. and the impact of the digital age. This course will take a look at two extended moments: the early cold war of the late 1940s and 1950s; and the first decade of the 21st century. Authors will include writers such as: Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, Sylvia Plath, Paul Bowles, Gwendolyn Brooks, Dave Eggers, Claire Messud, Junot Díaz, Craig Thompson, Jennifer Egan. (This course may count towards the American Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the American Studies or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the liberal studies graduate and advanced graduate study certificate programs. )

This course will examine some of the exciting and innovative Latina/o literary works produced since the beginning of the new millennium, including novels by Junot Diáz and Luis Alberto Urrea, short stories by Joy Castro, a memoir by Carmen Giménez Smith, and poetry by Rosa Alcalá and US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera. Latinidad as an umbrella category comprising many diverse groups, each with its own history and cultural traditions, is a relatively recent phenomenon. But how did this group come into existence as a social phenomenon, let alone as a literary field? In addition to considering this question, we will pay special attention to how the works we study portray relationships among different US Latino groups and between Latinos and other US ethnic and minority groups. The tensions between the internal divisions of latinidad and its lateral affiliations make this body of literature vital for anyone interested in understanding the complexity of twenty first-century American racial formations. (This course may count towards the American Literature, Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, Comparative and World Literature, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

From the Civil War to the Lost Generation, and from the Vietnam conflict to the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, there has long been an intimate relationship between war and American literature. In the past decade, a number of returning US veterans have published novels and short stories set in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of them ambitious and sophisticated. Works set in and around war have frequently been places where questions about national identity and the changing status of the United States in the world have been played out in rich ways. In the past century, new technologies of warfare and the ever changing media used to report war has had a profound impact on the way these conflicts have been experienced and translated to a distant public. This course explores the relationship between literature (and some film) representing war, the historical understanding of the opposing side (the enemy), and narrative techniques developed to make sense of what is an inherently confusing situation. We will focus especially on World War II, Vietnam, and the 21st century conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, with comparative attention to representations of the war from the “other side.” Close readings of literature will be enhanced with some theoretical writings on cinema frontier narratives, war and postmodernism, empire and imperialism, and postcolonial studies; we will attend to questions of gender, race, disability, nation, subalternity. Texts: Works by writers such as Gertrude Stein, John Hersey, Miné Okubo, Hisaye Yamamoto, Norman Mailer, Gwendolyn Brooks, Joseph Heller, Ralph Ellison, Tim O’Brien, Michael Herr, Siobhan Fallon, Ben Fountain, Phil Klay, Michael Pitre, Elliott Ackerman, Hassan Blassim, Sinan Antoon, and Viet Thanh Nguyen. Theoretical and critical writings by authors including Paul Virilio, Friedrich Kittler, Richard Slotkin Jean Baudrillard, Gayatri Spivak, and Edward Said. (This course may count towards the American Literature, 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 also count towards the American Studies or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

We hear about bad mothers on the news, read about them online and in news print, see them in movies, and perhaps complain about them with our friends. But what, exactly, is a Bad Mother? How do we know? Where does she come from? In this course we will read novels and watch films that help to constitute, perpetuate, and challenge normative scripts of what constitutes good mothering. This seminar will likewise provoke students to critically analyze the varied factors that shape and define contemporary motherhood as an embodied ideology. Our seminar’s key themes include the institutionalization of motherhood, motherhood as subjectivity, agency and performance, technologies of reproduction, narratives of adoption, and the politicization of motherhood. Texts and authors will include Nella Larsen, Adrienne Rich, Philip Roth, Alice Walker, Buchi Emecheta, Edwidge Danticat, Margaret Atwood, Tillie Olsen, Mommie Dearest, Rosemary’s Baby, The Manchurian Candidate, Kramer v. Kramer, Juno, The Good Wife, and The Blind Side, along with a unit on global media and iconic mothers including Angelina Jolie, Lady Di, Mother Theresa, Mother Goose, Margaret Sanger, Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, MADD, Whistler’s mother, and Kate Gosselin. (This course may count towards the Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, American Literature, Comparative and World Literature, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the American Studies, History, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

The US-Mexico border has been the site of intense cultural conflict since the mid-nineteenth century. It marks both the connection and the division between two nations, and many of our most fraught conversations concern whether the border should be a bridge or a wall. As an entry point into these conversations, this course will survey literature and film centering on the US-Mexico border. Students will become familiar with the history of the border, beginning with the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848 and extending through NAFTA and up to the current political climate. Together we will consider how the border has become such a potent site for contemporary mythmaking, a flashpoint for anxieties about race, labor, gender, and sexuality. Literary texts will include Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands / La Frontera (1987), Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek (1991), Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing (1994), Carlos Fuentes’s La frontera de cristal (1995), Juan Felipe Herrera’s 187 Reasons Mexicans Can’t Cross the Border: Undocuments (1995), and Carmen Boullosa’s Tejas (2014). (Texts originally written in Spanish will be taught in English translation.) Films will include The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1982), Selena (1997), The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), and Sin Nombre (2009). (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 and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It 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. It may also count as a literature course or an elective in the creative writing program.)

One could search through the annals of American literature without being able to find two bigger books than Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Moby-Dick. In the first place, of course, both books are long, and part of this course will consider the specific pleasures and challenges of reading big books. How do we gauge, and thereby engage with, narratives of disproportionate scale and encyclopedic ambition? How do we lose--or find--our place in colossal fictional worlds? But Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Moby-Dick have also both been big in another sense: they are hugely influential and profoundly consequential novels. Indeed, one cannot really understand American literary, cultural, and political history if one is not familiar with them. Stowe’s novel was a watershed text for both sides in the Civil War. Upon meeting Stowe, Abraham Lincoln reportedly said to her, “So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!” Stowe’s novel sold 300,000 copies in the first year—an unprecedented number—and her story became the basis for countless stage adaptations, spin-offs, parodies, editorials, refutations, and re-writes. (Check out some of them here: <http://utc.iath.virginia.edu>) The reputation of Melville’s novel took longer to take shape—its early readers enjoyed the material about whaling, but didn’t quite know what to make of the story of Ahab’s obsession with the White Whale. But over the course of the twentieth century these views reversed themselves, and Ahab’s maniacal quest has come to be widely recognized as a work of unparalleled resonance and ambition. Our work will be, like Ahab, to take on these Leviathans better to understand them and the worlds they shaped—including, by no means incidentally, our own. (This course may count toward the American Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the Master of Arts in Literature and Advanced Graduate Study Certificate programs. It may count toward the American Studies, Religious and Ethical Studies, and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies and Advanced Graduate Study Certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

This course centers around ten commercial narrative movies of the last five years, each of which achieved substantial critical and cultural impact. We will use these films to refine our abilities to close-read cinematic texts and to situate them within relevant cultural and historical contexts. Throughout the course, we will learn terms and apply concepts related to framing, editing, sound mixing, and other film-specific crafts, employing them to illuminate and debate artistic subtleties in each assigned movie. Alongside other interpretive approaches specific to each case study, we will pay particular attention to how all of these movies challenged old ideas about gender and sexuality or innovated new ones. About half the films originated as pre-existing short stories, plays, memoirs, or essays; in those instances, we will discuss how not just the scripts but the filmmaking nuances transform the literary material. Even in cases where the films hail from original screenplays, we will read and discuss historical sources, scholarly articles, and creative art works in multiple media that can deepen our analyses of the movies in question. We will occasionally use class time to screen clips of other recent films that relate meaningfully to the ideas, stories, and styles of the assigned texts. Students in the course may write their final papers about these optional “recommended” texts or about those that are foregrounded in the syllabus.

Likely films include 12 Years a Slave (2013), Birdman (2014), The Lobster (2015), 20th Century Women (2016), Arrival (2016), Moonlight (2016), A Fantastic Woman (2017), Lady Bird (2017), The Rider (2017), and The Square (2017). Other texts include fiction by Raymond Carver and Ted Chiang; prose by Solomon Northup; poetry by Danez Smith; and essays by Hilton Als, Michael Cobb, Cáel Keegan, Robin Morgan, Wesley Morris, Viviane Namaste, and others.

(This course may count towards the American Literature, 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 also count towards the American Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

This course uses an archive of films produced and/or released between 1999 and 2002 to construct a specifically cinematic and a more broadly cultural history of the shift from one millennium to another. Some of our conversations will focus on global anxieties, including apocalyptic apprehensions about Y2K, increasing proliferations and paranoias regarding networked technology, and public climates immediately before and immediately after 9/11. At other times, we will take stock of particular trends within the U.S. as reflected on silver screens, including surges of trans and nonbinary storytelling, changing debates over African American representations, and rising crescendos of white male insecurities and neofascist rhetoric. Alongside but also within those discussions, we will take stock of how film itself was evolving, with particular attention to digital advances, web-based writing, and shifting relations and rivalries with television. Participants in the course will experiment with different genres of writing and practice different research skills in relation to texts and themes that interest them most. Films screened in full or in part are likely to include American Beauty (1999), American Movie (1999), Beau travail (1999), Being John Malkovich (1999), Boys Don’t Cry (1999), Fight Club (1999), The Matrix (1999), Rosetta (1999), The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), Amores perros (2000), Dancer in the Dark (2000), Amélie (2001), Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), Kandahar (2001), The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), Southern Comfort (2001), Spirited Away (2001), Training Day (2001), Y tu mamá también (2001), Waking Life (2001), and 11’09”01 (2002). (This course may count towards the Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, American Literature, Comparative and World Literature, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the Master of Arts in Literature and Advanced Graduate Study Certificate programs. It may also count towards the American Studies or Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies and Advanced Graduate Study Certificate programs. This course may also count as an elective in the Master of Arts and Fine Arts in Creative Writing program.)

Nineteenth-century American poetry has frequently been reduced to the study of two poets--Whitman and Dickinson--who stand apart from the rest by virtue of their eccentricity and extraordinary ambition. This selective account of poetic inheritance has produced the unusual circumstance of a canon that needs to be opened not only to culturally marginal but also to culturally dominant poets and poetic forms. This course integrates the study of Whitman and Dickinson with the study of a vastly expanded canon of American poetry. The course also reads theoretical and critical texts that raise questions about canonization and the formation of literary historical narratives. (This course may count towards the American Literature 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 or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature requirement or elective in the creative writing program.)

How do we reimagine the world we live in? How can we envision it in radically new ways and not just as a better version of the present one? Since Thomas More’s inaugural text, Utopia (1516), this endeavor of the imagination has developed together with and as a response to the changes that have defined modernity (from colonialism to industrialization) and affirmed the question of the future as one that is indissolubly aesthetic and political. While tapping into this longer tradition, this course will explore the ways in which contemporary writers and filmmakers in the West have employed the science fiction genre to challenge notions of historical progress, individualism, and humanism. In these works, more often than not, utopian and dystopian visions find themselves intertwined, upsetting the boundaries between hope and despair, violence and redemption. Together with key essays by Ernst Bloch, Donna Haraway, and Fredric Jameson, we will read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, and China Miéville’s The City & the City. We will also watch Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049. Throughout the course, we will foreground questions relating to technology and daily life, climate change, and social justice. (This course may count towards the American Studies, History, 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 a literature requirement or elective in the creative writing program. Additionally, this course may count towards certain certificates of graduate studies.)

What are the ways that the idea of “world-making” has been approached and reinvented by writers intrigued by the contours of epic? This course analyzes the large themes invited by the genre of epic as they become illuminated in modern and contemporary literature, focusing on three specific works—James Joyce’s Ulysses, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.. (This course may count towards the American Literature, British Literature, Comparative and World Literature, Film, Literature and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature program. This course may count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies program. It may also count as a literature requirement or elective in the creative writing program. Additionally, this course may count towards certain certificates of graduate studies.)

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.)