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Visual & Cultural Studies Course Offerings
Spring 2008
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Critical Theory Courses | Visual Studies Courses | Electives
Core Critical and Cultural Theory Courses
- CONTEMPORARY ART: THEORY/PRACTICE
AH 415/CRN 85280/SA 415/CRN 85300
W 1400-1640 - Morey 205
R. Haidu - This course is designed for Studio Art majors and minors, though it is open to other interested students. We will study the artistic developments of the 20th and 21st centuries, focusing on different artistic inventions and their legacies. For example, we will look at how painters, sculptors, filmmakers, and even dance and performance artists of the '50s, '60s, and '70s reused, reinvented, and eventually overcame Duchamp's much earlier "discovery" of the readymade. We will look at how different ideas of the human body, gender and sexuality have come to generate different artistic practices, and at how advances in technology—from the invention of photography forward—have changed the nature of art itself. Guest speakers, including working artists, will allow students to hear and see different perspectives on material under discussion. Grades are based on class participation, bimonthly journal entries, and a final writing project.
- AFRICAN-AMERICAN VISUAL CULTURE
AH 466/CRN 85333
R 1400-1640 - Morey 506
J. Saab - This course will survey African-American visual culture (including painting, sculpture, photography, prints, textiles, mixed media, installations, performance and video) in the United States from Colonial times to the present. Its purpose is to introduce students to as wide a range of artistic productions and to provide a social historical frame for the interpretation and analysis of works of art. The course will encourage students to question the theoretica, ideological and aesthetic assumptions of artists, collectors, art criticis and art historians in making and categorizing artistic production. In particular, we will explore the ways in which the constructs of "race," "gender," and "diaspora" have influenced representational practices, the training and education of artists, public and private patronage, art criticism and art historical analyses.
- RESEARCH SEMINAR IN VCS
AH 584
W 0900-1200 - Morey 506
J. Saab - This course is a continuation of AH593 and is limited to first and second year Visual and Cultural Studies students. Students should enter with a a fully articulated project. The first few classes will be dedicated to research and writing strategies. The rest of the semester will be dedicated to the students' projects. At the end of the semester, each student will present their work in a professional, conference-style format and complete a paper worthy of publication in an academic journal.
- NIETZSCHE & THE NIETZSCHEANS
CLT 482B/CRN 83569
GER 405/CRN 83538
MW 1525-1640 - Dewey 4162
J. Peck - Friedrich Nietzsche continues to be one of the most influential modern philosophers, yet controversy surrounds almost every aspect of his life and work. This course will help students go beyond the controversy in order to consider Nietzsche's texts discerningly and how he approached the problems of truth, power, and morality. Close examination of his most important writings will be complemented by inquiry into Nietsche's effects on twentieth- century philosophy, literature, and visual culture. Other thinkers include Heidegger, Foucault, Kofman, Derrida and Deleuze. Readings and discussions are in English.
- SLAVERY & THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN NOVEL
ENG 428/CRN 82783
TR 1400-1515 - Harkness 115
J. Tucker - This course surveys the entire tradition of African-American drama, paying particular attention to the genre's formal characteristics. Plays will also be read and discussed with attention to specific historical and thematic contexts, such as the era of slavery, social protest, interracial relations, intra-racial differences of class, gender, and sexuality, and contemporary attitudes toward black history. Featured playwrights include James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Alice Childress, Charles Fuller, Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Suzan-Lori Parks , Ntozake Shange, Anna Deavere Smith, August Wilson, George C. Wolfe, and others. Required texts include " Black Theatre USA : Plays by African Americans 1847 to Today." Students will be evaluated on class participation, weekly reading responses, and two formal papers. Students will also be required to attend Wednesday evening screenings of video/film performances of (approximately) eight of the course's plays or to view these performances independently. Applicable English Clusters: American and African American Studies; Literature and Cultural Identity. May also be applied to the cluster on Plays, Playwrights, and Theater on an exceptional basis.
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Core Visual Studies Courses
- DIRECTOR: JEAN-LUC GODARD
AH 411/CRN 85366/CLT 411J/CRN 85908/ENG 464/CRN 85924/ FR 482/CRN 86654
MW 1400-1515 - Morey 501
Screening: T 1940-2055 FMS 453F/CRN 85382
S. Willis - This course will survey the career of Jean-Luc Godard from Breathless (1959) to In Praise of Love (2001). We will explore the numerous issues that Godard places us as spectators and critics. We will explore the complex relationships his films establish between image and word, between sound and image, between stillness and motion. Our analyses will examine the central importance of literature and art history, as well as of popular culture, to the individual films & the corpus as a whole. The films we will consider include Mépris/Contempt (1963), Pierrot le fou (1965), Masculin-Féminin (1966), Weekend (1967), Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), Tout va bien/Alls Well (1972), Every Man for Himself (1980), Prénom Carmen/First Name Carmen (1983), Détective (1985), JLG/JLG: autoportrait (1995).
- CONTEMPORARY ART: THEORY/PRACTICE
AH 415/CRN 85280/SA 415/CRN 85300
W 1400-1640 - Morey 205
R. Haidu - This course is designed for Studio Art majors and minors, though it is open to other interested students. We will study the artistic developments of the 20th and 21st centuries, focusing on different artistic inventions and their legacies. For example, we will look at how painters, sculptors, filmmakers, and even dance and performance artists of the '50s, '60s, and '70s reused, reinvented, and eventually overcame Duchamp's much earlier "discovery" of the readymade. We will look at how different ideas of the human body, gender and sexuality have come to generate different artistic practices, and at how advances in technology—from the invention of photography forward—have changed the nature of art itself. Guest speakers, including working artists, will allow students to hear and see different perspectives on material under discussion. Grades are based on class participation, bimonthly journal entries, and a final writing project.
- WOMEN, CLOTH AND CULTURE
AH 459/CRN 85202
T 1400-1640 - Morey 506
J. Berlo - Why is it that throughout history and across different cultures, women are often associated with "soft goods" (cloth) rather than "hard goods" (sculpture)? We will focus on case studies that analyze women's varied roles in the production and use of cloth, from indigenous societies of Africa and the Americas , to colonial encounters in those regions, to modern artistry and the structures of globalized industry. Topics may include: raffia cloth made by royal women in Central Africa , textiles of Maya weavers of Guatemala , 19th century American quilters, Massachusetts "mill girls" of the 1830s, feminist artists of the past fifty years, and women and textile factory work in Asia today.
- VISUAL SUBLIME IN ART & CULTURE
AH 506/CRN85188
W 1400-1640 - Morey 506
P. Duro - The principal objective of the course is to undertake a reevaluation of the received ideas associated with the operation of the sublime in eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century art and culture. To this end, we will consider first the concept of the sublime in its Kantian and Burkian context, the better to understand the parameters of a notion that shaped not only eighteenth-century aesthetic theory but also provided the conditions for the advent of Romanticism. Themes in the course will include the industrial sublime; the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque; the classical sublime; the sublime in nature; and the romantic sublime.
- POP FILM GENRES: COMEDY & HORROR
ENG 459/CRN 43921
MW 1525-1640 - Dewey 2110E
J. Middleton - The course would examine these two genres of film that both purport to have a direct effect upon the spectator's body - provoking laughter, screams, or, often, a combination of both. It would explore each genre's history and defining characteristics, while also emphasizing moments of intersect6ion between the two, as in the increasingly campy slasher films of the 80s and 90s, or horror film parodies.
- CHINESE CINEMAS
ENG 462/CRN 82830
TH 1525-1640
G. Niu - The course examines diasporic Chinese cinemas from the People's Republic of China (PRC), the Republic of China on Taiwan (ROC), Hong Kong (HK), the U.S. and Canada , mostly from the 1980s to the present. We will pay special attention to the migrations of the films and individuals, including actors such as Chow Yun-Fat, Jackie Chan, Tony Leung, and Jet Li, actresses such as Joan Chen, Gong Li, Maggie Cheung, directors such as Ang Lee, Zhang Yimou, Jia Zhangke, Wong Kar-Wai, and others. We will cover a wide variety of genres, including epic, martial arts, action, thriller, comedy, and drama. Some experience with film studies, especially world cinema, and Chinese history will be helpful but is not required. Weekly outside screenings of films are required (but if you cannot attend the scheduled screenings, you may watch the films on your own time through the Multimedia Center reserves). Students will be evaluated based on short and longer writing assignments, class room discussion leading, participation, short quizzes. Applicable English cluster: Media, Culture, and Communication. Not open to students who took Eng 267, Topics in Media Studies: Chinese Cinemas, in fall 2004.
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Electives
- IMPRESSIONISM & POST-IMPRESSIONISM
AH 462/CRN 85243
TR 1400-1515 - Morey 205
G. Seiberling - This course deals with the interconnecting artistic concerns and subjects of artists such as Manet, Monet, Renoir, Pissaro, Morisot, Cassatt, Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin. It also investigates ways in which paintings and prints made during the later 19th Century in France in their representations of the city, the suburbs, leisure activities, and gender roles participated in communicating a particular world view. In addition to developing general skills of analysis students should emerge from the course with a strong feeling for the artists as individuals and artistic personalities, an ability to recognize and date their pictures, to interpret subjects, and an understanding of the way in which institutions operated in a seminal period in modern art.
- 20 TH CENTURY AMERICAN ART & CULTURE
AH 463/CRN 85265
TR 1105-1220 - Morey 205
G. Seiberling - This course will explore selected aspects of twentieth-century art, including issues of identity, difference, and the body and ways in which institutions have shaped art. Works in different media will be considered, including examples from George Eastman House. The course will focus on a limited time period or a theme.
- AFRICAN-AMERICAN VISUAL CULTURE
AH 466/CRN 85333
R 1400-1640 - Morey 506
J. Saab - This course will survey African-American visual culture (including painting, sculpture, photography, prints, textiles, mixed media, installations, performance and video) in the United States from Colonial times to the present. Its purpose is to introduce students to as wide a range of artistic productions and to provide a social historical frame for the interpretation and analysis of works of art. The course will encourage students to question the theoretica, ideological and aesthetic assumptions of artists, collectors, art criticis and art historians in making and categorizing artistic production. In particular, we will explore the ways in which the constructs of "race," "gender," and "diaspora" have influenced representational practices, the training and education of artists, public and private patronage, art criticism and art historical analyses.
- FILM HISTORY: MUSEUM STUDIES
AH 472/CRN 10928/ENG 468/CRN 43950
T 1830-2130 - GEH
P. Loughney - Major museums around the world are now collecting motion pictures and other types of moving image and audio-visual art with a level of commitment equal to their traditional interests in paintings, sculptures and other established art forms. These creative works exist in unique formats that bring special challenges to curators and archivists responsible for their conservation and proper exhibition. Taking full advantage of the George Eastman House's rich archival film collection and screening facilities, this course offers instruction in curatorial and preservation standards for motion picture, video, digital and audio materials with a contextual focus on museum, library and archive institutions. Class instruction emphasizes basic concepts of preservation, research, programming, cataloging, digital technologies and preservation; management and interpretation of collections; museum and institutional collections development policies; museum architecture relating to audio-visual media; fund raising and education. Students will be assisted in selecting a topical area of interest in film and media studies, relating to their broader academic pursuits, from which they will develop a special research project. 35mm archival film and other media screenings presented on class night in the Dryden Theatre at 8:00pm are considered part of the class. Enrollment is limited to 20 students.
- MUTILATED BODIES, MUT DISCOURSE C
CLT 421/CRN 85977
TH 1230-1345 - Morey 524
C. Kemedjio - "Transnational sisterhood" or cultural imperialism? Legitimate ritualized practice or outdated violent ritual? Genital cutting, female circumcision, female genital surgery? The controversy over this practice already begins with the act of its naming. If there seems to be a consensus about the physical violence imposed on the female body, why is it that western feminist discourse is suspected of perpetuating the mutilation of African voices? This course seeks to provide an understanding of the context in which a fragmented "transnational sisterhood" allows for a proliferation of mutilated discourses on mutilated postcolonial bodies. Readings and Films include Alice Walker ,Florence Ayissi Fauziya Kassindja, Maryse Conde (Who slashed Celanires Throat) and more critical and theoretical readings from African, French and North American authors. In English.
- MIDDLE ENGLISH ROMANCE
ENG 402/CRN 82692
MWF 1100-1150 - Morey 524
R. Peck - Of all literary genres, romance comes closest to the core of human experience and expectation. Originating in the social and political matrices of its culture, a romance commonly engages its audience by moving beyond familiar definitions of good behavior to explore uncertainties and contradictions within the society's ethical values. This course focuses on popular English literature of the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries, when England was moving from a manorial society with its feudal Christian values toward more urban, mercantile structures where discrepancies between theory and practice loom large. We will be dealing primarily with a rapidly developing vernacular literature that draws on folklore, local mythology, and a vague sense of English selfhood as the protagonists find themselves trapped in difficult situations that drive them into unfamiliar terrain (wildernesses, monstrosity, treachery, weird animals, and deviant behavior), where cunning enemies would supplant their integrity, forcing the heroes (male and female) to redefine their rightful domain as they struggle to reclaim their former societies on new terms. The stories are lively, inventive, highly entertaining, usually quite short, and utterly amazing in their range of traumatic circumstances. Fulfills the pre-1800 requirement for the English major. Applicable English cluster: Medieval Studies.
- CHAUCER
ENG 404/CRN 43772
MW 1230-1345- B & L 315
T. Hahn - Chaucer's reputation as "Father of English Literature," though deserved, sometimes obscures the fact that he is perhaps the funniest (lol) writer in our language. He is also among the most intellectually curious, most book-learned, and most experimental of authors. Writing at a moment when there was virtually no "serious" poetic tradition in English (hence the paternity claim), Chaucer more or less invented vernacular writing (and style) as a category. He did this in part by placing the writer "Geffrey" - a version of himself - at the heart of many of his fictions, and this entirely likeable but totally elusive sense of Chaucerian personality contributes greatly to the pleasure and challenge of reading. Chaucer's language (Middle English) is old, and initially requires conscious effort for understanding; it is also one of the most distinctive and direct versions of English that we have, melodious, abrupt, and plangent by turns, memorable in itself and in the ways it forces us to pay attention to the language we now speak. We will read Troilus and Criseyde (one of the two or three greatest poems in English), a selection from The Canterbury Tales, and a selection of shorter narrative poems. Students will have a chance to read and recite medieval English, and will write two short papers or reports (2-3 pages each), and a longer final paper; there will be a final exam. Fulfills the pre-1800 requirement for the English major. Applicable English Clusters: Medieval Studies; Great Books, Great Authors.
- STUDIES IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE
ENG 423/CRN 86355
TR 1230-1345 - Harkness 210
S. RAJAN - Many areas of knowledge that we now typically associate with the social and natural sciences emerged and gained momentum during the nineteenth century. In this course we will examine the ways in which nineteenth-century British novelists, in particular, were influenced by and responded to the arguments of various "sciences" that were emerging during their time period such as political economy, evolutionary biology, and anthropology. The aim of this course is to situate canonical Victorian novelists like George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, and Anthony Trollope within contemporary intellectual conversations and the gradual emergence of new fields of knowledge. How did Victorian novelists integrate these new forms of knowledge into their narratives as they addressed such questions as human motives, social interdependence, shifting forms of property and finance, race, kinship, marriage, and sexuality? While the primary focus will be Victorian novels, the course will supplement readings of novels with selections from canonical figures in political economy, anthropology, and sociology such as Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and E.B. Tylor. In addition to providing necessary intellectual background, the course will use these supplementary readings to examine how different forms of writing (e.g. the novel, economic and anthropological texts) shape the way similar questions and problems are addressed, often leading to rather varied conclusions.
- 20 TH CENTURY BRITISH NOVEL
ENG 431/CRN 82716
MW 1525-1640 - Morey 501
B. London - When the now-classic novels of writers like Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and D.H. Lawrence were published in the first part of the 20th century, readers were shocked by both their style and content. In the face of revolutionary upheavals in social and political life and in the understanding of human psychology and personal relationships (including the devastating effects of WWI), modernist writers proclaimed the end of fiction as we know it, calling into question the very notion of "reality". Looking back at this fiction from our vantage point at the beginning of the 21st century, we will reconsider what made these works both "modern" and shocking". We will pay particular attention to the challenges they posed to received understandings of gender, sexuality, history, and personal identity, and to the ways they explored the limits and possibilities of language and representation. Pairing earlier twentieth-century novels with novels from the second half of the century, we will also look at the way later writers revised the idea of modern consciousness and the fiction appropriate to it and at the ways they responded to the post WWII remapping of the British Empire and to the construction of postmodern and postcolonial identities. Applicable English Clusters: Novels; Modern and Contemporary Literature.
- CONT. WOMENS WRITING: INT. LIT.
ENG 448/CRN 82803
MW 1230-1345 - Morey 505
B. London - The last decades of the 20th century and the first of the 21st have seen a virtual explosion of writing by women, with novels by women constituting some of the most widely read and critically admired work being produced today. Among the distinctive features of this literary resurgence is the global reach of both its authors and audiences, making contemporary womens writing a truly international phenomenon. This course will explore the implications of this internationalization of womens writing, asking what novels from a range of national and cultural locations (and a range of languages of origin) have to say to each other. It will also ask how well our reading practices and cultural assumptions (including well-established feminist premises) equip us for reading works produced in other cultures, especially non-Western ones. The course will be loosely organized around the theme of translation: translation understood in its broadest sense as a move between languages, cultures, and conventions. We will look at both novels written in English and novels in translation, and we will consider what it means for particular authors to write, or not write, in English. We will also consider how these novels stage the problem of what can and cannot be translated: in terms of language and in terms of experience. As one form of translation, we will explore the way contemporary women writers have adapted or translated the novel for their own ends, experimenting with new voices and narrative forms that often blur the traditional borders of the genre. At the same time, we will also look at the way much contemporary writing by women has deliberately turned to the past for its inspiration and self-consciously appropriated, or rewritten, earlier texts and historical moments. This course fulfills the Studies in International Literature requirement for the Certificate in Literary Translation Studies. Applicable English cluster: Gender and Writing. May also be applied on an exceptional basis to the clusters in Modern and Contemporary Literature.
- REVOLUTION ROMANTIC AESTHETICS
ENG 529/CRN 82982
M 1000-1250 - Morey 403
M. Eaves - This year the Romantics seminar will focus on the radical shift in ideas about literature associated with the Romantic period (c. 1775-1825) of British literature-an era of enormous cultural, political, and artistic innovation and transformation accompanied by equally enormous stresses and strains. That unique combination of factors motivated the writers of the era to reexamine the foundations of their artistic lives and to ask profound questions about the status of literature and its relation to the larger world of love, work, politics, and history. How, these writers wondered, could they justify their very existence as producers of literature? Might poets be, as Shelley wrote with a characteristic display of optimism undercut by doubt, "the unacknowledged legislators of the world"? Was the life of imagination, as Blake supposed, the source of a cultural transformation that could transform the world as we know it? Inspired in part by the radical sociopolitical ideas of the American and French revolutions, the Romantic writers developed the core critical and artistic theories that have become indispensable in our own thinking-originality, imagination, self-expression, nature with a capital N, art with a capital A. Such ideas provide a near-perfect platform for considering other ideas that concern us: self, other, gender, race, etc. Unless we understand what the Romantic writers were up to, we shall not understand ourselves.
- STRANGERS IN A STRANGE LAND
GER 431/CRN 86328
TR 1400-1515 - Meliora 209
J. Hwang - In this course we will explore various discourses of German Jewish identity including, but not limited to, Zionism, assimilation and anti-Semitism. Although the three categories may at first appear to have little in common with one another, each plays a critical role in the formation of the others. This semester we will examine the complicated relationship between them. Our primary focus will be literature, film, journals and newspapers of the early twentieth century, but we will also look at texts from earlier and later time periods. Readings and discussions are in German.
- ON THE MOVE: TRAV, WAND & EXPLORE
GER 448/CRN 85827/CLT 448/CRN 85840
TR 1105-1220 - MEL 224
J. Hwang - This course will cover a wide variety of literary traditions in which mobility plays a central role, including travelogues, travel films, novels and critical theory. The time period we cover will be from the nineteenth century to the present day. Some of the questions we will explore are: What are the reasons people move from one place to another? Who controls the movement and how? What role does this access to mobility or lack thereof play in our understanding of who we are and the world around us? Readings and discussions are in English.
- MOTHERS, COMRADES & WHORES
GER 488/CRN 86070/CLT 412P/CRN 86116
TR 1230-1345 - Morey 402
J. Creech - In this course we will explore representations of women in post-World War II German cinema. Moving chronologically from the building of two German states to the post-unification period, we will consider the constantly shifting meaning of woman in popular and avant-garde films, narrative and documentary films, films by both male and female directors. We will consider equally films from East and West Germany . How does woman function as a narrative device in these films? Do women behind the camera change womans meaning within the film? Can woman consistently be reduced to one narrative trope (mother, comrade or whore), or does she resist? All readings and discussions are in English; all films are subtitled.
- THE POWER OF PRINT
HIS 402/CRN 83350
R 1400-1640 - RRLib 456
J. Rubin - This course will examine the history of books, readers, and literacy in the United States from the colonial period to the present. It will explore how the printed word shaped both public events (e.g. the Civil War) and private experience (e.g. relationships within the family). The course will consider such topics as: the relationships between gender and reading; the connections between reading and citizenship; the impact of technological change on the book; the social uses of various kinds of reading; and the nature and development of literacy.
- CHANGING CONCEPTS OF HEALTH AND ILL
PM 480/CRN 83145
MW 1400-1515 - Harkness 115
T. Brown - The long-term intellectual history of essential ideas in the Western medical tradition: illness, health, and mind/body interaction. The time span ranges from Greek antiquity to the present day, with emphasis on the last 250 years and on the relationship between emotional and biological factors in the onset and experience of disease. Primary sources include Hippocrates, Galen, Maimonides, Descartes, Gaub, Charcot, Freud, Alexander, Cannon, Engel. Secondary sources include Porter's THE GREATEST BENEFIT TO MANKIND: A MEDICAL HISTORY OF HUMANITY.
- LIT & CULT OF THE CARIBBEAN
SP 462D/CRN 86296
MW 1400-1515
R. Rodriguez - This course focuses on the Spanish-speaking Caribbean within the larger cultural, historical and political context of the Caribbean Basin . We will examine indigenous, European and African influences on the molding of national cultures and identities as found in literary, cultural, and theoretical texts. Readings include examples from modern and contemporary Cuba , Puerto Rico , the Dominican Republic and Yucatan . Writings of Nicolas Guillen, Eugenio Maria de Hostos, Jose Marti, Roberto Fernandez Retamar, Ana Lydia Vega, and writers and artists of the Caribbean diaspora. Class taught in Spanish.
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