Fall 2004

Course Descriptions

Theatre Research and Bibliography (Professor Pamela Sheingorn): This course is designed to acquaint students with methods of research in theatre history, criticism, and theory as they are currently practiced. We will work through the stages of the research process, from developing an original idea or question to locating primary materials to setting parameters for the research project. Along the way we will become acquainted with the important periodicals in the field. We will gain familiarity with the forms in which research ideas and projects are formulated, such as the abstract and the dissertation proposal, as well as the forms in which completed research is presented, such as the seminar paper, the scholarly article, the conference paper, and the monographic study. During the semester I will assign a number of exercises designed to achieve the goals set out above. In addition, there will be a final examination. Texts include Wayne C. Booth et al., The Craft of Research and Thomas Mann, Library Research Models.  Thursdays, 4:15pm to 6:15pm. Aesthetics of Film (Professor Stuart Liebman): This course introduces students to graduate level film analysis by acquainting them with basic film techniques, strategies, and styles. Central topics to be studied include narrative and nonnarrative forms, mise_en_scène, composition, camera movement, editing, sound and music, genre, and spectatorship. In addition, students will become familiar with a variety of critical perspectives on film as well as the essential bibliographical sources and fundamentals of research in the field.   Mondays, 6:30 pm to 9:30pm.

Theatre Historiography (Professor David Savran): This course is designed to give you a critical awareness of the changes that have taken place in the writing of theatre history as well as theatre and performance studies more generally. The readings will focus on problems that have long preoccupied theatre scholars: questions of performance, contextualization, the reliability and value of evidence, and the relation of theatre studies to other disciplines, including sociology, economics, gender studies, art history, and musicology. We will consider a broad range of methods and styles—from liberal historiographies to poststructuralist and Marxist ones—in an attempt to assess what counts as history in different kinds of scholarship. Because this course is intended in part to give you an overview of recent work in theatre studies, we will examine new historical methods and attempt to pinpoint emerging areas of research. The course will develop your theoretical self-awareness by allowing you to experiment with a variety of approaches, to do research on a subject of your choosing, and to present an oral report comparing and contrasting three books about your chosen topic. During the last part of the semester you will progress through the stages of writing an original research paper. Tuesdays, 4:15pm to 6:15pm.

Seminar in Film Studies: Professions, Power, and Portraits (Professor Mary Ann Caws): A study of the ways in which various professions and the worlds they represent are portrayed, with the kinds of power that work within their realm, and the types of personalities within them, in film, with a few sallies into a television series. The broadly or finely etched portraits and the actors who present them are of especial interest, as are the ways in which certain professions seem to summon certain kinds of beings, and how they change – or not. What kind of development can arise and be powerful in itself. An additional complication is the sort of actor as he or she determines the representation (e.g. William Hurt in Broadcast News and The Doctor). If it is a question of series (Rocky I, II, etc., or the Forsythe Saga, to take 2 different types) or The West Wing, the issue of development will be a thorny one, or less so, depending on the creators. A few biographies, if there is time, or scenes from them (The Young Mr. Lincoln, Francis Bacon, etc.) Among the films and the careers represented, in whatever order will seem to work best – this is only an indicative sampling, clearly, for there are many more possibilities, depending on the epoch. Whenever the "straight representation" and then a parody are available (for example, a Jesus film and The Life of Brian), we may think of both. NB. Not necessarily these films: this is just an indication. Depending on the interests of the seminar participants, others may be added. On Point – the world of the ballerina, and a more recent one; Broadcast News, Up Close and Personal, Front Page – desk stuff and news reporting; Stevie, Sylvia, Tom and Viv—the poetic world; The Quiet American, The Third Man – the espionage world; M. Poirot, etc. – detective world; Bringing up Baby – world of collecting and museums; Is There a Doctor in the House? Dark Victory, Magnificent Obsession, The Doctor– the world of medicine; Blackboard Jungle, Dead Poets Society, The Affair – the world of education; Shakespeare in Love – biography, and the world of the dramatic writer; Days of Heaven – world of the farmer; Legal Eagles, To Kill a Mockingbird, Philadelphia -- the world of law; Old Man and the Sea, Moby Dick, Mutiny on the Bounty, Master and Commander- the sea and sailors; The Front Line – the point of view of the bodyguard; Upstairs Downstairs, The Servant – of domestic service; The Notebooks of Anna Magdalena Bach, Clara and Robert Schumann, Hilary and Jackie; etc. – the world of music; The West Wing, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, The Maltese Falcon, All the President’s Men-- the world of politics and government; Parody: Wag the Dog; Dr. Strangelove Rocky, etc. –the world of prizefighting; Parody: Movie Movie; The Last Emperor; I Claudius; etc. -- royalty. Readings from such writers as John Berger, Krakauer, Roland Barthes, Eisenstein, Tom Gunning, the Mast and Cohen reader, James Monaco, Bordwell, Bluestone, Molly Haskell, Andrew Sarris, and the French cubist Blaise Cendrars, the surrealist Robert Desnos, etc. etc. Tuesdays, 6:30pm to 9:30pm.

Seminar in Film Studies: American Silent Stars: The Other "System" (Professor Marc Dolan): This course explores the ways in which the stars of American silent film constructed their own "system" for making movies that in many ways subverted the narrative and stylistic strictures of contemporary studio production. Central importance will be given, of course, to the formation of United Artists, the avenue through which many star-produced features of the late silent era reached the public. Attention will also be given, however, to the relationships stars developed—even within the studio system—with preferred scenarists, directors, designers, co-stars, and even cinematographers. Weekly screenings and discussions will include the films of the United Artists group (Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith), the Keystone comedians (Mack Sennett, Mable Norman, Fatty Arbuckle, Charlie Chase), "star directors" (Lois Weber, Erich von Stroheim), and star performers of the silent era (Clara Bow, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino), as well as the films of figures like Greta Garbo and Allan Dwan who were able to find a place within both the star-dominated films of the silent era and the sound-era studio products that superseded them. There are four requirements for this course: (1) active participation in discussions; (2) a ten to fifteen minute presentation with descriptive bibliography, which should summarize the spectrum of scholarship on a specific assigned figure in the development of American silent film, to be given at a time that will be scheduled at our August 30th meeting; (3) a brief presentation of original scholarship on a figure or figures in American silent film, to be given on 6 or 13 December and (4) a 20-25-page seminar paper that treats your original scholarship in greater detail, due 20 December. Syllabus & reading list available in Certificate Programs Office, Room 5109.   Mondays, 11:45am to 1:45pm.

Seminar in Film Studies: American Film Industry and Global Culture (Professor Frederick Wasser): This course will concentrate heavily on Hollywood and it will teach Hollywood as an industrial center for both the United States and the world. It will cover such events as the early development of the film industry, particularly in France and the USA, the rise of the feature film and the demise of the Motion Picture Patents on Company (MPPC) vertical integration and the creation of Hollywood as a global center, the history of Universum Film AG (Ufa), the national and international impact of sound, the relation between film and theatre such as relative decline of the theatrical road show, the State Department and Hollywood, the 1948 consent decree, film and broadcasting, wide screen and other technical developments, the Euro-American film, the first wave of conglomeratization, the Indies, New Hollywood, High Concept, the mini-majors and Goldcrest, Carolco, and Dino DeLaurentiis, Home Box Office (HBO), video distribution, Universal v. Sony, the second wave of conglomeratization, television sans frontieres policy, North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) compromises, Hong Kong and Bollywood, digital cinema. Several key themes will be revisited such as the primary one of ‘threat’ of cultural domination both within the nation and on the international scale. This will enable students working in various fields to engage in political economic analysis of power in the culture industries, to consider the relationship of cinema with the changing everyday life of the audience, and to assess the importance of the film industry in the general economy. This course will be conducted as a seminar. Each student will be responsible for one oral presentation to the class and a five-page written report that was the basis for the presentation. The bulk of the grade will be determined by a term research paper on a topic selected by the student and approved by the instructor. Wednesdays, 6:30pm to 9:30pm.

Seminar in Film Studies: Performance and Race in Cinema, 1890 thru' the 1930s (Professor Michelle Wallace): Relatively recently born cultural stereotypes and clichés (coming out of the visual culture of African enslavement in the Americas) were rife at the same time that the earliest films were also extremely brief and relatively easy to produce, allowing for a range and variety of images that quickly overwhelmed what had been some of the most compelling stereotypes on the stage and performance (such as blackface or chicken stealing), at the same time that other kinds of images (for instance, eating watermelon, stretching one's eyes, or cheating at cards) were catapulted to the fore. In general, there was the emergence of anything having to do with a confirmation of what some have called the "Confederate Myth," the ideology of "The Lost Cause" or, briefly, the idea that the South had lost the Civil War, and that it had been a cultural tragedy. Such features grew particularly salient in cinema produced in the U.S. in the wake of the 50th anniversary of The Civil War, along with the simultaneous appearance of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation in 1915. "Race films" grew into the increasing market of segregated theatres in the teens, and in the wake of the turmoil and controversy surrounding Birth of a Nation, as well as in reaction to the anger over the shenanigans of Jack Johnson and other black heavyweight fighters. We will consider, in particular, the recent scholarship on Oscar Micheaux, thus far the most celebrated of the race film directors. We will also look at other works from the late teens and the early twenties attempting to depict the lives of other non-white cultures in a curious hybrid of anthropology and fiction, including Flaherty, Nanook of the North, Cecil B. DeMille, The Cheat, and D.W. Griffith, Broken Blossoms, (1916), for the light they are able to shed upon the many permutations and facets of cultural solipsism gradually integrated into dominant film practices. Despite the many objectionable features, this is a body of work which is collectively unforgettable and irreplaceable. The more I see of it, the more I feel compelled to share it with others. If there is time left, I would like to conclude this course with a consideration of early efforts to capture African American performers on sound film, including the work of Bessie Smith in St. Louis Blues, Duke Ellington Black and Tan Fantasy, Louis Armstrong Rhapsody in Black and Blue, and Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, Lee De Forest, (1922) and in a series of other musical shorts. If we find the time, we may also include comparisons of King Vidor's Hallelujah (1929), Shanghai Express (1932), John Stahl's Imitation of Life (1934), and Josephine Baker in Zou Zou (1933). My choices will be guided by the directions of recent publications on these and related subjects. Requirements are, besides class attendance and reading, a 10-12 page term paper on a topic of your choice at the end of the class. We will spent a lot of class time, perhaps 2/3rds viewing films. All or most films will be made available for viewing outside of class in the library, usually. Requirements: Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines and Charles Musser, Oscar Micheaux & His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2001. Phyllis R. Klotman, Project Director, African Americans in Cinema: The First Half Century. CD-Rom. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Fatimah Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1996. Robert Lang, ed. The Birth of a Nation. New Brunswick: NJ, 1994. Michele Wallace, The Good Lynching and The Birth of a Nation: Discourses and Aesthetics of Jim Crow, Cinema Journal 43, No. 1 (Fall 2003) 85-104. Michele Wallace, Uncle Tom's Cabin: Before and After Jim Crow, The Drama Review. Gary D. Keller, Hispanics and United States Film: An Overview and Handbook. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Review Press, 1994. Excerpts taken from: Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991. Lee Grieveson and Peter Kramer, eds. The Silent Cinema Reader. New York: Routledge Press, 2004. Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence, Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silents, and His Audiences. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2000. William M. Drew, D.W. Griffith  Intolerance: It's Genesis and Its Vision. McFarland & Company, 1986. Alison McMahan, Alice Guy Blache, Lost Visionary of the Cinema, Continuum 2002. Required and Recommended Films: Within our Gates (1919), Body and Soul (1924), Symbol of the Unconquered (1920); Colored Players, Scar of Shame (1926); Alice Guy Blache, A Fool and His Money (1916); Bert Williams, The Gambler (1916); Edison, The Watermelon Contest, Morning Wash, UTC, The Watermelon Patch, Spirit Dance, Chinese Laundry; Toll of The Sea (1921); Uncle Tom's Cabin (1914) & (1927), Topsy and Eva (1927); Flaherty, Nanook of the North (1922); Thief of Baghdad, The Cheat; D.W. Griffith, Birth of a Nation, Broken Blossoms, Intolerance; King Vidor, Hallelujah!; Dudley Murphy, St. Louis Blues (1929); Noble Sissle & Eubie Blake, Lee De Forest Musical Short (1922), That's the Spirit (1932); A Rhapsody in Black and Blue (1932); Black and Tan Fantasy (1929); John Stahl, Imitation of Life (1934); James Whale, Showboat; Shanghai Express (1932); Marc Allegret, Zou Zou (1933). Thursdays, 6:30pm to 9:30pm.

Seminar in Theatre History and Production: Contemporary German Theatre Production (Professor Marvin Carlson): The German theatre was in the latter part of the twentieth century among the most innovative and varied in the world, with a remarkable variety of leading directors and scenic artists offering work in a large number of cities with financial and technical support that allowed them a freedom of expression unequaled in any other contemporary theatrical culture. This course will examine the work of a number of key directors of the past 15 to 20 years, in an attempt to understand and appreciate the range of their contributions. The course will begin with the great directors Peter Stein and Peter Zadek who led a revolution in German staging during the 1960s and remained among the most influential and revered directors through the end of the century, but will concentrate on those directors who emerged in the 1990s, such as Frank Castorf, Thomas Ostermeier, and Christopher Marthaler. A knowledge of German would obviously be helpful, but is not required, as readings will be in English and video selections of the works of the directors studied will be of their interpretations of familiar classic authors, primarily Shakespeare and Ibsen. Students will be required to submit two papers considering the career of a single director or a detailed analysis of a single production. Video showings from 7pm to 9:30pm. 
Mondays, 2pm to 4pm.

Seminar in Comparative Drama: European Avant-Garde between the Wars: 1918-1939 (Professor Daniel Gerould): A study of the development of experimental dramatic forms (including mass-spectacle and agit-prop, as well as futurist, expressionist, and constructivist) during a period of revolution and social upheaval leading to the collapse of old regimes and the rise of new totalitarian systems on both the right and the left. The approach will be interdisciplinary, with focus on the interactions among drama, painting, music, and stagecraft; the symbiotic relations of art and politics; and the impact of technology and new scientific advances, seen as liberation or catastrophe. The art and literature of the inter-war years offer prophetic visions of the future, utopias and dystopias, which will be the objects of our special attention. The period was also rich in the formulation of manifestos and doctrinal statements, and theoretical works by Lagerkvist, Mayakovsky, Artaud, Brecht, and Witkiewicz will be studied. Plays to be read include: Bulgakov, Flight and Crimson Island, Mayakovsky, Mystery-Bouffe, The Bedbug, and the Bathhouse, Lev Lunts, The Apes Are Coming, Čapek, R.U.R, Brecht, Lehrestücke: The Baden-Baden Learning Play and The Measures Taken, Horváth, Tales from the Vienna Woods, Witkiewicz, The Anonymous Work and Gyubal Wahazar, Jasieński, The Mannequin’s Ball, Salacrou, The World is Round. The contributions of women playwrights will be featured in our reading of Felicja Kruszewska, A Dream, Berta Lask, Liberation, Elisabeth Hauptmann, Happy End, and Stanislawa Przybyszewska, The Danton Case. The growth of cinema and its importance for the interwar avant-garde will be the focus of an exploration of Fritz Lang’s film, Metropolis. In addition to occasional short reports, the major requirement of the seminar is a long research paper due toward the end of the semester. Wednesdays, 4:15pm to 6:15pm.

Modern Drama (Professor Felicia Bonaparte): The last one hundred and fifty years has been one of the most intense and varied in the history of drama. Responding to countless revolutions in art, philosophy, science, technology, economics, society, politics, and any number of other aspects of a rapidly changing world, drama has taken new directions in a thousand different ways both in subject and in form. Our purpose in this course will be to explore this evolution through some representative works. Our focus will be on Western drama, which makes a coherent body of works, but within that limitation, we will look at works that cross the span of the period and tradition . Where appropriate, we will look at staging, styles of acting, scenery, and a variety of other theatrical concerns. And finally we will also make small forays into different kinds of drama, as in opera and film. Those familiar with other languages will be encouraged to read works, where they can, in the original. Our reading list will consist of the following : Ibsen, Hedda Gabler, Strindberg, Miss Julie, Strauss, Salome (from the play by Oscar Wilde), Shaw, Man and Superman, Checkhov, The Cherry Orchard, Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, Hauptmann, The Weavers, Odets, Awake and Sing, Brecht, Mother Courage, Miller, Death of a Salesman, Wilson, Fences, Kennedy, A Movie Start Ought to Star in Black and White, Kushner, Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, O’Neill, Desire Under the Elms, Lorca, Blood Wedding, Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman, Camus, Caligula, Ionesco, The Bald Soprano, Beckett, Endgame, Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author, Albee, Tiny Alice, Bergman, Persona (film), Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guilderstern are Dead. Course Requirements: a class presentation exploring an aspect of a play on our common reading list and a term paper focused on a work we are not discussing in class. Fridays 11:45am to 1:45pm.

History of American Theatre: A Century of Social Protest: American Political Drama 1880-1980 (Professor Alisa Solomon): This course will examine how American social movements have employed theater as an instrument of social change. Looking at a range of plays and performances addressing women, workers, war, racial justice, and sexuality, we will attend to political and aesthetic questions of form, function, audience, and artistic and historical context. While understanding the role of such works in their own times will be paramount, we'll juxtapose suffragist agit-prop to feminist and lesbian-feminist agit-prop of the 1970s; labor union plays of the 1930s to the Living Theatre's efforts in Pittsburgh; Living Newspaper plays about sexually transmitted diseases to early plays about AIDS; and so on. In doing so, we will focus on dramatic strategies and their relationships to political goals. Of course we will consider how and when dramaturgical experimentation can itself be a political gesture. Thus we will range far beyond agit-prop and include poetic dramatists such as James Baldwin, Adrienne Kennedy, and Maria Irene Fornes. The course will be run as a seminar and will require a presentation, two short papers and one major research project.  Mondays, 4:15pm to 6:15pm.

Theatre and Society: Latin American Theatre and Performance, 1960-2004 (Professor Jean Graham-Jones): In this seminar we will take a “geochronological” approach to studying Latin American theatre and performance of the last forty years. Particular attention will be paid to the principal trends and movements of late-twentieth-century Latin American theatre. As we analyze the dramatic/theatrical text as a sociocultural and aesthetic phenomenon, we will observe Latin American theatre practitioners’ and theorists’ adoption, adaptation, critique, and rejection of “foreign” traditions as well as their creation of specifically “Latin American” theoretical and aesthetic models. Among the playwrights, performers, and groups to be discussed in the course are: Griselda Gambaro, Osvaldo Dragún, Eduardo Pavlovsky, Ricardo Monti, Roberto Cossa, Diana Raznovich, Teatro Abierto, and Teatroxlaidentidad (Argentina); Augusto Boal and Denise Stoklos (Brazil); Jorge Díaz, Egon Wolff, Diamela Eltit, Juan Radrigán, the Gran Circo Teatro de Chile, and Benjamín Galemiri (Chile); Enrique Buenaventura, Teatro Experimental de Cali, and La Candelaria (Colombia); Teatro Escambray, José Triana, and Tania Bruguera (Cuba); Rosario Castellanos, Maruxa Vilalta, Emilio Carballido, Jesusa Rodríguez, Petrona de la Cruz Cruz, and Sabina Berman (Mexico); Alan Bolt, Teyocoyani, and Nixtayolero (Nicaragua); Yuyachkani (Peru); and Myrna Casas and Luis Rafael Sánchez (Puerto Rico). Wednesdays, 6:30pm to 8:30pm.