THE GRADUATE CENTER

If you purchase your books through http://www.gc.cuny.edu/bookshop, you will receive discount prices (through arrangement with Amazon.com and other retailers) and the Mina Rees Library will receive a 15% donation for the purchase of library books. Most of these books, of course, are also available to borrow from the Graduate Center and other CUNY schools’ libraries.

N.B. The Methods of Research course is limited to 15 students, other lectures are limited to 20 students and seminars are limited to 12 students. Three overtallies are allowed in each class but written permissions from the instructor and from the Executive Officer and/or the Deputy Executive Officer are required.

This class aims to introduce its participants to art historical study at the graduate level. The class will critically

examine a variety of interpretive methods associated with the practice of art history, particularly those developed over the past forty years, such as social history, feminism, semiotics, deconstruction, visual culture, postcolonialism, and so on. In that sense it will provide a necessarily partial history of recent art history. The class will ask participants to develop their skills in looking, researching, writing, and argumentation, four of the basic components of academic art history. However it will also take account of other common art historical practices, such as those encountered

in the studio, in museums, and in galleries. In brief, the motivating principle of the class will be a single crucial question: "what is the purpose of art history?" No auditors.

Eric Fernie, “Introduction: A History of Methods,” Art History and Its Methods: A Critical Anthology (London: Phaidon, 1995), 10-21.

ART 73000 - Topics In Medieval Art and Architecture: Early Christian and Byzantine Art

The Byzantine Empire at its height reached from Italy to the Middle East and lasted for over one thousand years. Despite the Empire’s longevity, Byzantine art is typically portrayed as the garish final stage of Roman art or is overshadowed by Gothic art. The Byzantines, however, made contributions that cannot be overlooked in a study of Medieval Europe, such as perfecting the art of wall mosaics and developing the use of icons, to create some of the most spectacular medieval art in existence today. Furthermore, Byzantine engineers accomplished many feats of engineering, such as the great dome of Hagia Sophia, that for years were only truly understood by the Ottomans who inherited the great church. This class will explore the fundamental debates of the field while surveying the major monuments and art of the Byzantine Empire, with a view into Byzantine society. Byzantine image theory, the nature of iconoclasm and the use of icons, defining secularism in an Orthodox society, the construction of sacred space, the categories of Western/non-Western in relation to Islam and the Medieval West, and gender and sexuality will be among the topics discussed. Auditors permitted.

Thomas F. Mathews, The Clash of Gods, revised and expanded edition (Princeton: 1999). NB: the revised and expanded edition is important to note because it has an additional chapter not in the early edition.

ART 75010 - Topics in Italian Renaissance and Mannerist Art and Architecture: Bellini to Veronese: Art in Northern Italy 1400-1600

Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in the Veneto, Lombardy, and Emilia will be examined. Special attention will be given to the work of the Bellini, Mantegna, Giorgione, Titian, Bordone, and Palma Vecchio. New themes and trends in Venetian painting, such as the introduction of genre scenes and developments in portraiture, will be studied. The influences of fifteenth-century Flemish and Florentine painting on Venetian artists will be addressed. The cultural forces that provided the impetus for the burgeoning of images of the female nude will be presented, and new interpretations of such imagery will be discussed. We will also study the distinctive structures peculiar to Venetian architecture, the application of the classical orders, and Islamic influences, on architecture in the Veneto. Four (4) auditors permitted.

Students should familiarize themselves with the illustrations in Wethey, Harold. Titian, 3 vols. Phaidon, c.1976.

Meiss, Millard. Sleep in Venice: Ancient Myths and Renaissance Proclivities, 1966.

Lotz, Wolfgang. Architecture in Italy 1500-1600, 1992 read chapters 8 & 12 on Sansovino and Palladio.

Santore, Cathy, "Danaë, the Courtesan’s Alter Ego," Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschicte, 59, No. 3, (1991),pp. 412-427.

ART 76010 - Topics in Late 18^th and 19^th Century Art and Architecture: Historicism and Revivals in 19^th -Century Culture

The course will treat in an historical and theoretical way the related phenomena of historicism and revivalism in 19^th-century European and American culture. Largely lecture in format, the course will begin with a theoretical discussion of the simultaneous rise, beginning with Romanticism, of “historical-mindedness” and a concept of modernity. Readings and in-class commentary will address some of the historical and epistemological reasons for which history became an increasingly important preoccupation for writers, painters, architects, designers and others at the precise moment that the “newness” and distinctiveness of the modern age was announced.

Subsequent lectures will investigate the extent and implications of, as well as the motivations behind, the series of revivals that were widely discussed on both sides of the Atlantic during the nineteenth century. For instance, the successions of neoclassical and medieval revivals of the first three-quarters of the century will be addressed, paying attention to the ways in which the material expressions of interest in the past functioned in relationship to contemporary concerns about modernization in all of its forms. The vernacular and colonial revivals (the latter in the US) of the last quarter of the nineteenth century will also be discussed, and at the end of the semester, we will consider the extent to which modernism—sometimes construed in opposition to revivalism—nonetheless manifested an engagement with history. Evaluation will be based on participation in in-class discussions, essay and slide-based midterm and final examinations, and a short paper. Auditors permitted.

Stephen Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History (1994); Francis Haskell, History and Its Images (1993).

ART 76020 - Topics in Modern Art: An Alternate Modernism: Italian Art in the Twentieth Century

This is an in-depth survey course of all the major artists and movements – from Futurism to the transavanguardia - , with a detour into post WWII Italian cinema as the first national-popular Italian art. The course proceeds chronologically and thematically, with attention to what is both particular to the Italian situation, and indicative of the larger European avant-garde. The theories of Marinetti, Gramsci, and Pasolini will be given special consideration. Among the issues to be covered are art and politics (the Catholic Church, Fascism, and the Communist Party); the tension between technology and traditional aesthetics in the modernization of the Italian nation; kitsch, irony, poverty, and violence as forms of cultural strategy; representation of the private and the public spheres; and how the Italian twentieth century renders facile any strict dichotomies between modernism and post-modernism, high and low. Auditors permitted

Emily Braun, ed., Italian Art in the Twentieth Century Munich and London: Prestel Verlag and the Royal Academy, 1989

ART 78500 - Topics in Art and Architecture of the Pacific: Art of the Pacific

This course is an introductory lecture course on selected art styles in Melanesia, Micronesia, Indonesia, and Polynesia. It covers the following art-producing areas and cultures: Gogodala, Elema, Asmat, Lake Sentani, Iatmul, Abelam, Trobrian Is. and Tami art on the island of New Guinea; Chachet, Kairak, and Uramot Baining art and Sulka and Tolai art in East New Britain; Maglanggan art of Northern New Ireland and Western Solomon Is. art; New Caledonian and Fijian art; Palaun art; Dayak art in Borneo; Tahitian and Raratongan art; Marquesas art; and Hawaiian, Easter Island, and Maori art of New Zealand.

Requirements: Each student will prepare a short in-class presentation with selected bibliography on a major scholar of Pacific Island Art. There will also be a ten-page museum-based research paper, and a final exam. No auditors.

The appeal of photography as an object of study is precisely that there is no aspect of modern life-from birth to death, from sex to war, from atoms to planets, from commerce to art-that is not entirely infiltrated and mediated by practices of photography of one kind or another. This is also the problem of photographic history as a discipline: how do you develop a coherent and effective method of analysis for an entity that is so ubiquitous and various? How can you

speak with equal intelligence about the photograph as a thing, and about what any particular photograph is of? How can you identify the meaning of such a photograph when that meaning is largely determined by its context, a context that is always shifting and is therefore itself hard to define? Photography's refusal to stay put makes it a problematic medium to study in an art history program; it is by its very nature an interdisciplinary beast and never simply an 'art.' This course

aims to examine these questions through a close study of the history of photography in the twentieth century as it develops within a number of specific thematics, from the advent of the First World War through to the present. The class's structure will allow for individual sessions to combine a formal, illustrated presentation with some time left for a discussion of particular images and texts. Taken as a whole, the class will look at photography as a cultural phenomenon as much as an art form, critically studying the various discursive arenas which this medium has helped to foster and redefine over the past century. Auditors by permission only.

Joan Fontcuberta, 'Revisiting the Histories of Photography,' Photography: Crisis of History (Barcelona: Actar, 2004), 6-17.

ART 79500 - History of the Motion Picture: History of Cinema I: 1895-1930

GC: Mon., 11:45 A.M.-1:45 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Dolan, Rm. C419, [94389], [Cross-listed with THEA 71500, MALS 77200 & FSCP 81000

This is a course in the history and historiography of the silent cinema, from the zoopraxiscope experiments of Eadweard Muybridge to the reluctant conversion of industries, artists, and audiences to fully synchronized sound. Much of the course will explore how the foundations of modern filmmaking evolved out of the rudimentary work of the earliest filmmakers--how the Edison and Lumière “actuality” films led to the explicitly labled “documentary,” the cinematic tricks of Georges Melies to the fantastic action/adventure film, the early melodramas of Porter, Guy-Blache, and Griffith to the so-called “classical” narrative style, etc.

However, the course will not employ an exclusively auteurist approach. We will also consider the developments of specific national film industries, particular genres, and the points of intersection between those two sets of developments (e.g., American slapstick, Italian historical epics, Swedish naturalism, German expressionism, Soviet montage). Moreover, the play between the identifiable national cinemas and the syncretic medium of international cinema will be a central theme of the course, especially since the idea of film as a potentially universal language was one of the most powerful dreams of the silent era. (List of films available upon request).

Students will view on reserve and in class individual examples of all these types of films, and two classes during the term will be devoted to reconstructed programs (including short subjects, newsreels, cartoons, etc.) of what a typical audience might have seen when they went to the movies in 1912 and in 1927. Course requirements: Class participation; one 15-minute presentation; a 20-page final paper, reflecting students’ original scholarship. No auditors, permits, non-matrics.

Readings will primarily be drawn from David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s Film History: An Introduction and Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen’s anthology Film Theory and Criticism.

ART 85010 - Seminar: Selected Topics in Italian Renaissance and Mannerist Art and Architecture: Trecento Italy: Crossroads of Feudalism and Humanism

At a 1990s symposium on Renaissance historiography, two panelists debated whether the Renaissance should be mainly understood as a revival of classical art and ideas or as the cradle of the “early modern”: their respondent proposed instead that it be viewed as the final phase of the Middle Ages. The best answer is that it was all three at once. If the 14^th century was, in Johan Huizinga’s famous phrase, “the autumn of the middle ages,” it was also the early spring of

This seminar will focus on the 1300s in Italy as a crucial hinge in the long European transition from a feudal, medieval, exclusively Christian culture to a republican, bourgeois, secular and classicizing society. We will examine major cultural centers of the peninsula ranging from the aristocratic courts of Milan and Naples, closely tied to the development of the courtly international Gothic: to the emergent republics -- Florence, Siena, and (briefly) Venice; to the church-dominated culture of Avignon, the papal headquarters in exile, where Italian culture intersected with France and the north. In addition to a broad grounding in the major stylistic and regional schools, personalities, and monuments of the period, the course will emphasixe key issues both within the period itself and in its historiography. These will include: the contrast in patronage goals and aesthetic ideals between the hereditary military aristocracy and the urban capitalist middle class; the rise of vernacular languages and parallel artistic styles; art as political propaganda; mutual influences within and between Europe, Islam, and farther Asian cultures; the beginnings of classical humanism in literature and philosophy and their impact on the arts; and the utility and limits of social history (the “Black Death” controversy).

Course requirements: Weekly readings and class discussion, including a written critique of one reading assignment. Illustrated oral presentation to the class, 30-40 minutes, on a topic to be chosen with instructor’s consultation and approval. Written version of the talk, with illustrations, footnotes, and bibliography, to be submitted on last scheduled class day (during exam period). Auditors permitted.

Diana Norman, ed., Siena, Florence, and Padua: Art, Society and Religion 1280-1400 (2 vols., , particularly the introductory essays) (Yale, 1995). Available now at GC Reserve collection, cat. # N6913 S53 1995/

James Stubblebine, Assisi and the Rise of Vernacular Art (Harper, 1985), esp. chapters 6 and 7. In GC Reserve, # ND2757 A8 S88 1985.

ART 86020 - Seminar: Selected Topics in Modern Art: Abstraction vs Figuration between the Wars in Germany, the Soviet Union and the Netherlands

Experimental artists working in Germany, the Soviet Union, and the Netherlands between the Wars became enmeshed in highly volatile battles about the value and power of abstraction in comparison to figuration. Political issues, nationalistic concerns, technological attitudes, as well as antisemitic and antifeminist diatribes, polarized artists, critics, patrons, and museums directors. In this course, we will examine manifestations of these battles in the paintings, photography, sculpture, and design associated with Dada, Neue Sachlichkeit, the Bauhaus, Constructivism/Productivism, and De Stijl. We will also discuss how critics such as Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Osip Brik reflected and contributed to these polemics. Students will prepare an oral report, plus a paper based on their report. Auditors by permission only.

George Grosz, "My New Pictures" (1921) in German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, ed. RCWLong (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 274-277; and Bertolt Brecht, "Popularity and Realism" (1938) in Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, rev. ed. C. Harrison and P. Wood (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA.: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 489-493.

ART 86020 - Seminar: Selected Topics in Modern Art: Women’s Art Practices: Modern and Contemporary

Organized thematically, and with a case-study approach, this course explores what is (and has been) at stake in the decision by female artists to align their practice with feminism, or not. Also at issue are the stakes entailed in the historian's decision to assimilate women's art practices to a feminist critique, or not, and the diverse and changing character of the forms such critiques have assumed. Auditors permitted.

Preliminary Reading
Griselda Pollock, "Inscriptions in the Visible" in Inside the Visible, ed. C. deZegher, and Broude/Garrard, The Power of Feminist Art.

ART 86020 - Seminar: Selected Topics in Modern Art: From Surrealism Through Pop: The Sculptural Imagination

From Cornell’s boxes to Bontecou’s Worldscapes, this course will examine sculptural production from Surrealism through the postwar era in light of politics, theories of mass culture, gender, and psychoanalytic theory. We will begin by analyzing the conflicting approaches to Surrealism and conclude with the emergence of Pop and the discourse of the spectacle. The Cold War, space age and populuxe design will be discussed in relation to a wide variety of objects ranging from Roszak’s welded post-apocalyptic predators, to Wurlitzer’s l948 juke boxes with acrylic domes shaped like bomber noses, to Holocaust memorials and to David Smith’s war medals. The work of artists such as Giacometti, Noguchi, Smith, Bourgeois, and Oldenburg will be among those presented. Auditors permitted.

Julie Nicoletta, “Louise Bourgeois’s Femmes-Maisons:Confronting Lacan.” In Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, Reclaiming Female Agency, 2005, pp. 361-372

Mignon Nixon, Fantastic Reality, Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art, MIT, 2005, pp.1-12, 209-65.

Lucy Lippard, Robert Storr, Rosalind Krauss, Thomas McEvilley, in Louise Bourgoies, Ed. Peter Weiermair, Edition Stemmle, l989/l995, pp. 13-39

ART 86030 - Seminar: Selected Topics in the Modern Architecture: Modernism and Globalization: A Survey of 20^th Century Architecture, Design and Urbanism

How have architects and designers responded to the challenges as well as opportunities presented by accelerating twentieth-century globalization in various cultural and political contexts? This thematic graduate-level survey of 20th-century architecture, design, and urbanism examines the development of modern architecture in an increasingly globalizing world. Among leading individual architects and firms considered – in varying degrees of detail – will be: Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Buckminster Fuller, Kenzo Tange, Hassan Fathy, Oscar Niemeyer, Norman Foster, Santiago Calatrava, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, and Frank Gehry, along with such firms as SOM (Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill), KPF (Kohn, Pedersen, Fox), HOK (Hellmuth, Obata, and Kassabaum). We will also be investigating critically such movements as the Deutscher Werkbund, the International Style, the Bauhaus and its successor institutions (notably Harvard’s GSD and Chicago’s IIT), CIAM (The International Congress of Modern Architecture), Critical Regionalism, Post-Modernism, and Hi-Tech Architecture. The conceptual pairing “modernism and globalization” will be used to organize our twentieth-century material and probe the function of architects in their roles as artists, practical builders, visionary thinkers, and creative entrepreneurs. Class meetings will include discussion, debate, and student presentation, along with a selection of thematically structured lectures. No auditors.

Students unfamiliar with 20th-century architecture will benefit from a look beforehand at Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History; Dennis Doordan, Twentieth-Century Architecture; and Le Corbusier, Towards A New Architecture.

ART 86040 - Seminar: Selected Topics in Contemporary Art: Themes in Contemporary American Art: The Whitney Biennial

Today, artists’ identities are exposed as multi-variant and subject to change and this reality is reflected in their art. What, if any of the art-historical methods currently used to analyze, interpret, and define visual art production remain viable given the complex, and slippery practices of living artists? The Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial, a highlight of the 2006 spring exhibition season in New York that both critics and the public love to hate, consistently challenges analysts, theorists, and critical thinkers. This course will use the Biennial to investigate the role that scholarly practices might play in the recording of living artists’ processes and production.

Flora Miller Biddle, The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made: a Family Memoir (1999)

ART 86040 - Seminar: Selected Topics in Contemporary Art: Video: History, Theory, Politics

This course explores the history, theory, and politics of video as a political and artistic form. By the end of the semester students should:

1) Be familiar with the major developments in the history of video art in the United States: —the introduction of portable video equipment—early radical media projects—the relation between video and the rise of conceptual performance art.

2) Understand the central aesthetic and critical questions of the field: —the specific features of the medium (real time, screen space, feedback, liveness, portability, etc.) —the relationship between video art and other forms of art and areas of cultural production (e.g. painting, film, television, sculpture) —the object status of the video work

3) Understand the history of video’s use for documentary, activism, and self-expression: —autobiographical uses of video

—uses of video to document and protest—video as a medium for exploring issues of identity

Course Requirements: Students will complete one major assignment for the class, a 25-30 page research paper on a topic chosen in consultation with the instructor. Each student will meet individually with me one month before the end of the semester to discuss his/her final project, and proposals for the final papers will be due two weeks before the end of the semester. Papers should involve substantial original research and should display both mastery of issues covered in the class and the ability to apply course concepts to the paper topic. No auditors.

Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg, eds., Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices

ART 87300 - Seminar: Selected Topics In American Art and Architecture: Pan-American Issues

When Alfred Jaar created his animated projection in Times Square - a map of the United States with the text “This is Not America” - he was addressing a theme of this seminar. Does “America” refer to the United States, Latin America, Canada, or the entire western hemisphere? This course provides students with a firm grounding in the major themes and issues in the art history of the US and Latin America, from 19^th century to the present. By crossing borders - geographic and intellectual - and examining these two traditions in a comparative context, we gain new perspectives and move toward a critical framework for pan-Americanism. Topics include: critical framework for theorizing pan-Americanism; attitudes toward landscape & history across the Americas; Chicano/a, Nuyorican, and Dominicans in the US; African-Americans across the Americas; role of art critics in multiple contexts, etc.

Requirements: discussion of reading and an original research project, including oral presentation and written paper. The first half of the semester is focused on the professor’s lectures and discussion of readings; the second half is devoted to presentation of student projects. This course can count either as “US” or “Latin American” field category. Five (5) auditors permitted.

Preliminary Reading

Earl Fitz, "The Five (Six?) Faces of American Modernism," Rediscovering the New World. Inter-American Literature in a Comparative Context. Iowa City: University of Iowa, 1991.

ART 87500 - Seminar: Selected Topics in American Architecture, Urbanism, and Design: Modernism and Historicism in America Between the Wars

The Machine Age in America 1918-1941 (1986) will form the core of a critical discussion that will differentiate, more clearly than this publication, between the social underpinnings of the free-wheeling twenties and the Depression-era thirties. It will also attempt to define the flowering of the American skyscraper in the twenties as a phenomenon of the Jazz age rather than the “Machine Age.” The course will expand H.-R. Hitchcock’s layered historical model to deal with the avant-garde, the historicizing Beaux-Arts, as well as popular commercial styles (Art Deco and Streamlined Moderne). Further, it will explore institutional structures such as the Metropolitan Museum’s and MoMA’s influence on architecture and crafts together with the newly conceived profession of industrial design. The impact of exhibitions (Chicago Century of Progress, the 1939 New York World’s Fair) will be examined for their projection of a synthesized modernity. Sheldon Cheney’s Art and the Machine will be contrasted with Lewis Mumford’s critical stance against technology. Among the individuals to be discussed are architects Frank Lloyd Wright, Eliel Saarinen, Hugh Ferriss, Raymond Hood, Rudolph Schindler, Richard Neutra, and Julia Morgan; industrial designers Norman Bel Geddes, Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin Teague, Donald Deskey; and artist-designers Eva Zeisel, Frederick Kiesler, and Isamu Noguchi. It will conclude with the influx of European Modernists in the thirties and the conflict this created for many American practicioners. A research paper based on the seminar presentation of the student’s choice is required. Auditors permitted.

Richard Guy Wilson et.al., The Machine Age in America (Brooklyn Museum/Abrams, 1986).

Lisa Phillips, et.al., High Styles: Twentieth-Century American Design (Whitney Museum/Summit, 1985): first three essays by Hanks, Gebhard, and Bletter.

GC: Mon., 4:15-6:15 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Boddy, Rm. C419, [94401], [Cross-listed with THEA 81600 & FSCP 81000

This course explores some of the major texts and controversies within classical and contemporary film theory as well as a number of related theoretical issues from related fields. Our attention will focus on the analysis of primary theoretical texts, although films and secondary writings which assist in contextualizing film theory will also be examined. This course requires no previous experience in film studies, and students from a variety of academic backgrounds are welcome.

Course requirements: In addition to participation in seminar discussions (representing 10% of the final grade), each student is responsible for presenting selected readings to the class (10%), producing six weekly journal entries in response to course readings and screenings (20%), writing a 15-page research paper on a topic selected in consultation with the instructor (50%), and preparing an in-class presentation of the research project to the seminar (10%). No audits, permits, non-matrics.

The course will begin with several definitions of the cyborg which we will consider alongside significant early representations (Shelley’s Frankenstein, Lang’s Metropolis, and a few salient clips from Bride of Frankenstein). Next, we will analyze the components of early Cold War Cyborgania (Forbidden Planet, The Day the Earth Stood Still and its relationship to the cyborg of the nuclear apocalypse (Terminator and its myriad “progenies”). The third topic, the cyborg and capital, could easily be a course in itself, but we will restrict ourselves to the alien and alienation in the Alien series and the trenchant dystopia of muties and replicants in Blade Runner--the touchstone of the cyborganic intellectual--(and its contrast with Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Gibson’s Neuromancer). These readings will connect to the no less important problem of engendering the cyborg--a space, in particular, where feminist theory and fiction have been a good deal more radical than most high-profile film narratives (alongside the plethora of significant criticism in this area--Haraway, Balsamo, Wolmark, etc.--we will read at least one feminist sci-fi novel, Russ’s The Female Man or Piercy’s He, She, and It for instance). A fifth case study on cyborg narrativity will feature memory and the fate of history (the memory chip/clip as the memorial to the death of time in Total Recall, but also the time/space reversals of cyborgania in Twelve Monkeys or The Matrix). We will then consider whether AI stands for artificial imagination and whether this sense of artifice might ground rather than universalize cinema in the digital age-an exploration that will propel us into anime and transnationalism. No auditors, permits, non-matrics.

This course is an introduction to African American filmmaking from the early 20^th century to the present. We will start with effects and the “after” effects of early films, such as D.W. Griffiths Birth of a Nation, and the responses to the film by a selection of African American filmmakers over time. Throughout the semester, we will discuss the ways in which African American directors and other film personnel have addressed issues of representation, caricature, and sterotype through a variety of filmmaking styles and stories. We will examine the attempts by different directors and film theorists to define the parameters--or even the possibility--of a black film aesthetic or aesthetics and discuss the different forms these attempts have taken over time. Screenings throughout the semester will include a cross-section of films made between 1900 to the present and will be comprised of films made by African American filmmakers or other relevant films featuring black life and characters. By the end of the semester, students will be familiar with the following: Oscar Micheaux, race film production, the L.A. School of Filmmakers, blaxploitation, “hood” films, and a variety of contemporary independent filmmakers. Students will be able to analyze and discuss African American film and American film in the context of a number of theoretical and aesthetic questions, including: “What is black film?,” “What is a black film aesthetic?,” Where does black film fit in Hollywood?,” and “What have been the local and global effects of black filmmaking?” No auditors, permits, non-matrics.

André Breton, founder of surrealism, declared Murnau’s Nosferatu to be the most haunting of films: what of German expressionism passes over into Dada and Surrealist film? How does a film incarnate a surrealist project? To what extent does the fantastic militate against the “believable”? What has carried on into recent films: does ‘transrealism’ work as a notion? This seminar will examine some classic films of these several genres--as well as what connects them--and then their legacy, in the wake of the surrealist epoch, as it can be variously interpreted. For want of a better term, I am using the term “transrealist” here. Readings of film critics such as Kyrou, Matthews, etc.--and discussion of their points of view. The reading of some of the standard expressionist, Dada, and surrealist texts will accompany our examination, and oral reports will discuss those as well as the films. Two papers, a shorter, mid-term, and a longer, as well as informal paragraphs commenting on the screenings. No auditors, permits, non-matrics.

GC: Tues., 4:15-6:15 P.M., 4 credits, Prof. Coleman, Rm. TBA, [94405], [Cross-listed with MSCP 80700].

The course will be survey the following topics related to research on the medieval book:

1. The materials (papyrus, parchment, paper) used in constructing and binding medieval books, with particular

attention on the techniques for watermarking paper and on the bibliography of watermark research.

2. The copying and decoration of the medieval book; a survey of the history of Latin-alphabet paleography and manuscript illumination from the late classical period through the 15^th century.

3. The production and circulation of the medieval book; the organization of medieval monastic and secular scriptoria and the transmission and trade in books during the Middle Ages during the manuscript period (through the mid-15^th century) and during the incunabulum period (from the invention of printing until the end of the 15^th century). The course will introduce students to research and bibliography on the production of manuscripts and early printing.

4. The collecting of the medieval book; study of the various monastic and secular library collections during the Middle Ages.

5. The codicology of the medieval book; the various kinds of information that research on the book-as-object can provide.

Several guest speakers will make presentations on topics related to their work on the production and circulation of books during the Middle Ages. The course will have a special session at the Rare Books and Manuscript Division of the New York Public Library. Each student will make an oral presentation to the class and write a term paper on an issue related to the medieval book. No auditors. NB: Before beginning the course, students should visit the exhibit of Medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts at the New York Public Library, The Splendor of the Word. The exhibit, of 100 manuscripts from the 10^th through the 16^th centuries, is in the Gottesman Exhibition Hall of the Library’s main building, at Fifth Ave. and 42^nd St. Before visiting the exhibit, students should view the 13-page exhibit brochure online at: http://www.nypl.org/research/calendar/imagesexhib/splendor.

GC: Tues., 2:00-4:00 P.M., 3/4 credits, Prof. Carroll, Rm. [94018], [Cross-listed with CL71000.

RSCP 82100 is designed to help students work on their own research for their dissertations, orals, or research papers in Renaissance Studies. The course will include visits to Manuscript and Rare Book Collections in New York (including those at Columbia, The Hispanic Society, and the New York Academy of Medicine). Students will receive instruction in topics specifically related to research in the early modern period: codicology, paleography, textual editing and analytical bibliography. The major assignment for the course is an annotated bibliography. Other assignments include exercises in paleography, analytical bibliography, and an oral report related to one of the readings for the course on the history of the book. No auditors, permits, non-matrics.

PH.D. PROGRAM IN ART HISTORY

ART 79500 - History of the Motion Picture: History of Cinema I: 1895-1930