Course Descriptions

Theatre Research and Bibliography (Professor Judith Milhous): This course will concern such matters as providing an overview of the profession, participation in conferences, general research methodology, and approaches to historiography; and it will provide particular focus on the preparation and writing of research papers, conference papers, and papers for publication.  Examples and strategies will be drawn from as broad a range of geographical and historical material as possible.  Assigned readings and participation in class discussion; weekly written exercises; at least two class presentations; a final term paper; and an in-class exam on the scheduled exam date.
Thursdays, 2:00 pm to 4:00pm.

Contextual and Intertextual Studies in Drama (Professor Daniel Gerould): A study of selected dramatic texts from world drama, representing a wide range of traditions and forms, from ancient times to the present.  Three or more plays, depending on length, will be analyzed each week, along with ancillary theoretical and historical materials. Plays studied will be placed in historical, intellectual, and cultural contexts and viewed in relation to other works of literature, art and music.  Special consideration will be given to the nature and history of genres, such as farce, tragicomedy, melodrama, history play; types, such as the political, including agit-prop, living newspaper, documentary, verbatim; movements, such as Sturm und Drang, naturalism, symbolism; modes, such as satire, pastoral, grotesque, sublime; devices and conventions, such as parable, allegory, ekphrasis; themes and topics (topoi), such as myth, social or natural environments (ecocriticism), war, exile; cultural encounters, such as appropriation, adaptation, parody.  Assignments include one short and one longer paper and a final examination.
Wednesdays, 4:15pm to 6:15pm

Special Topics in Theatre and Popular Entertainment:  Critical Perspectives on American Musical Theatre (Professor David Savran):  American musical theatre has long been ignored, marginalized, or cordoned off by most theatre scholars and musicologists.  To all but legions of enthusiastic theatre-goers, musicals remain, in Gerald Mast’s pithy account, “essentially frivolous and silly diversions: lousy drama and lousy music.”  Because they represent the most category-defying theatrical form, they are especially adept at arousing the critical disdain and anxiety linked historically to middlebrow culture.  This course will be devoted to analyzing why musical theatre has been the only theatrical genre that could since the 1920s even begin to claim a place in popular culture.  How and why has the American musical theatre been assigned a middlebrow position in the constantly changing cultural hierarchy in the US?  This course provides an analysis of the history and historiography of the musical, from Showboat (1927) to the works of Stephen Sondheim, with critical analyses of music, text, performance, and reception.  New scholarship—on the sociology of culture, taste, orientalism, critical race theory, gender roles, and queer spectatorship—will be emphasized.  The class will focus both on the development of the genre, especially between Showboat (1927) and Gypsy (1959), and on individual musicals that have been especially adept at challenging generic boundaries, including Of Thee I Sing, Porgy and Bess, Pal Joey, Lady in the Dark, Oklahoma!, Street Scene, South Pacific, West Side Story, Hair, Follies, and Sunday in the Park with George. Although scholarship on musical theatre has long been anecdotal and superficial, a new generation of scholars has emerged that is questioning the clichés and transforming the field.  These include Andrea Most, D.A. Miller, Stacy Wolf, Raymond Knapp, Lauren Berlant, Kim Kowalke, and Steve Swayne.  We will frame our examination of this criticism with the work of theorists who have analyzed the history and sociology of popular and/or mass-cultural forms, including Theodor Adorno, Pierre Bourdieu, and Richard Middleton.  We will pay special attention to the musical’s relationship to other genres and media (including so-called straight theatre, opera, minstrelsy, vaudeville, jazz, musical modernism, and cinema), its role in consolidating American identities, its seemingly magical power to thrill and enrapture, and its status as a lightening rod for fears and anxieties swirling around cultural legitimation in the US.  
Tuesdays, 4:15pm to 7:15pm.

Seminar in Theatre History and Productions:  History of Directing (Professor Marvin Carlson):  This course will trace the evolution of the concept and practice of the director in the theatres of Europe and the United States.  It will begin with a brief study of how this function was carried out in pre-nineteenth century theatres, but will concentrate on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  Some theoretical texts will be covered but the emphasis will be on the way the art of directing has been practiced by leading directors, with special attention being given to the Russian directors of the Revolutionary period, German and French directors of the interwar years, and the major international directors of the late twentieth century.  Students will present two half-hour papers in class on the work of two particular directors and prepare a term paper tracing a particular directing tradition or comparing the work of two or more directors.
Mondays, 4:15pm to 6:15pm.

Theatre and Society:  Theatre and Performance in, around, and about Buenos Aires (Professor Jean Graham-Jones):  Rather than taking a nation-based approach, this course focuses exclusively on the theatre and performance of Buenos Aires, one of the Americas' cultural megalopolises and arguably home to more theatrical activity than any other city in Latin America.  Buenos Aires today has hundreds of theatres scattered throughout the city, and its practitioners are known throughout the world.  This course will survey the history of theatre and performance in Buenos Aires, from (and before) the city's two foundings to the present high level of activity.  We will look at related theatrical production taking place around Buenos Aires, especially in the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo, in order to situate the city's theatre and performance within a larger River Plate context.  Finally, this course will also include productions about Buenos Aires, such as the work produced by Argentinean expatriates and exiles as well as plays and performances in which Buenos Aires appears as subject.  Thus we will look closely not only at the complex relations of "immigrant" and "native" cultures present in the earlier traditions of the drama gauchesco, sainete criollo, and grotesco criollo; we will also trace the various currents in twentieth- and twenty-first-century practices through some of the key individual and group practitioners.  There will be a series of required online responses and interventions, as well as a final research paper.  Please note that this course has a prerequisite: all students are expected to have reading knowledge of Spanish.  While every effort will be made to provide the texts in English translation, not all of the plays, transcripts, or secondary materials have been translated into English.  The final research paper may be written in English or Spanish; class discussion will be conducted in English.
Thursdays, 4:15pm to 6:15pm.

Theatre and Society:  Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Theatre and Performance  (Professor James Wilson): In Robert Patrick’s The Haunted Host (1964), one of the characters asks another if the play he has written is a “heterosexual play.” The character responds by asking, “You mean does it sleep with plays of the opposite sex?” This seminar has two main objectives: First we will try to articulate, using a historical and cultural framework, what constitutes gay, lesbian, and queer theatre and performance as distinct from “heterosexual” theatre and performance. Is the categorization based on political/sexual content, authorship, and/or the mode of production? How fluid are the boundaries separating “heterosexual” and “queer” theatre and performance? The second objective is to examine the texts and performances within the economic and socio-political context in which they were created and/or produced. Why do some queer playwrights and performers integrate into the mainstream while others are relegated to the margins? How does “queer” spectatorship and theory complicate the reading of non-queer identified theatre and performance? In order to work toward these main objectives and to address some of the questions, we will discuss a range of plays, performances, and queer theory. A sampling of the playwrights and performers will include, but is in no way limited to, Oscar Wilde, Mae West, Tennessee Williams, Jane Chambers, Charles Ludlam, Paula Vogel, Holly Hughes, Cherríe Moraga, and Justin Bond and Kenny Mellman (Kiki and Herb). Students will be asked to engage with the plays and performances by applying and reading them against multidisciplinary scholarship and theory in queer studies. Judith Butler, John D’Emilo, Jill Dolan, José Estaban Muñoz, Joan Nestle, David Román, David Savran, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick represent a few of the critical and theoretical voices we will bring to the discussion of the texts. Writing assignments for the course will consist of responses to the readings and an original 15-20 page research paper (which will be preceded by a prospectus, annotated bibliography, and an optional first draft). Students will share their research in a short presentation.
Tuesdays, 2:00pm to 4:00pm.

Aesthetics of Film (Professor Edward D. Miller): Ever since the Lumiére Brother’s train arrived at the station, film has been concerned with its own mechanics and meanings and the ways in which film not only captures the moment but transforms it, creating an impact upon its audience with distinct aesthetics. This course highlights the self-referentiality of film and argues that a central aspect of the cinematic enterprise is the depiction of the filmmaking environment itself through the "meta-film." Using this emphasis as an entry into aesthetics, the course involves students in graduate-level film discourse by providing them with a thorough understanding of the concepts that are needed to perform a detailed formal analysis. The course’s main text is the eighth edition of Bordwell and Thompson’s Film Art and the book is used to examine such key topics as narrative and non-narrative forms, mise-en-scene, composition, cinematography, camera movement, set design/location, color, duration, editing, sound/music, and genre. In addition, we read Walter Benjamin’s "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in order to develop an understanding of the relationship between aesthetics and technology. We also read brief selections from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment and Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime in order to underline the affectivity of aesthetics. In the final section of the course, we examine the challenges that digital culture has brought to the aesthetics of the once entirely analog medium of cinema. Thus we discern the effects of computer generated imagery (CGI) on the appearance of cinema as well as the ramifications of what Henry Jenkins has named "convergence culture" on the cinematic arts. We ask how is the medium transformed when films are watched on a tiny iPod screen or accessed via YouTube. In addition, as many films are now shot using digital video—and are edited using nonlinear programs such as Final Cut Pro—we investigate how the changes in production and post-production environments are dramatically changing the look and sound of cinema. We read selections from Lev Manovich’s Language of New Media and query his notion of digital cinema and the database logic in order to determine if the listing and looping of the database is indeed becoming an organizing principle for film, challenging the traditional causality of narrative structure. As part of the course we cross genres and construct our own database of films that focus on the landscape and soundscape of the filmmaking terrain and highlight the aesthetics of cinema. As such, we watch Thanhouser and Marston’s Evidence of the Film (1913), Charlie Chaplin’s The Masquerader (1914), Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), Donen and Kelly’s Singing in the Rain (1952), Jean Rouch’s Chronicle of a Summer (1960). Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963), François Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973), Robert Altman’s The Player (1991), Tom DeCillo’s Living in Oblivion (1995), P.T. Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1998), David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), and Fulton and Pepe’s Lost in La Mancha (2002). We also look at the formal conventions of the "making of" documentary, now included as a subfeature on so many DVD versions of films. Students are expected to write short weekly response papers to the readings and screenings. The 12-15 page final paper is a critical analysis of a film that foregrounds the filmmaking process itself.

Enrollment is limited. No permits, non-matrics, auditors.
Tuesdays, 11:45am to 3:45pm.

Seminar in Film Studies:  Film History I (Professor Matthew Solomon): This course is an intensive examination of film history before 1930 that introduces students to international silent cinema, to the scholarly literature on early cinema, and to the practices of researching and writing film history. Topics for our consideration include the "emergence of cinema"; the "cinema of attractions"; the "narrativization" of cinema; theater and early film; sound, color, and the "silent" image; the industrialization of film production; national cinemas of the 1910s; the Hollywood mode of filmmaking; women and African-American filmmakers; and film movements of the 1920s. We will study the work of such filmmakers as Lumière, Méliès, Porter, Paul, Bauer, Christensen, Feuillade, Weber, Micheaux, Murnau, Dulac, Eisenstein, and others while considering the ways that silent films were exhibited and received in diverse contexts. Students will write a 15+ page seminar paper on a research topic of their choosing that has been approved by the professor and will conduct a smaller-scale historical research project making use of archival resources. In addition, students are expected to complete assigned readings detailed in the syllabus and to actively participate in class discussions.
Wednesdays, 11:45am to 3:45pm.

Seminar in Film Studies:  Contemporary Hispanic Cinema (Professor Nora Glickman): The films shown in this course explore through documentaries, fictional accounts and criticism, the migrations of peoples in and out of the Hispanic world from North Africa, Spain, England, the Caribbean, the U.S. and South America. They examine upheavals caused by wars, military dictatorships, economic hardships, religious and ideological persecutions. The films shown are renditions of historical events, literary adaptations and documentaries. I will try to have most of the films available to the students at the reserve room (except for those films borrowed for two weeks from the Cervantes’ Institute). Students are responsible for reading the assigned material prior to each session. Students will make brief presentations on the material covered during the course and will write a final comparative paper based either on a film not seen in class, or only partially discussed during the semester. Required text: Crossing Continental Bridges: Cinematic and Literary Representations of Spanish and Latin American Themes, Editors: Nora Glickman and Alejandro Varderi, Tucson: Chasqui Press. Arizona U. Press, 2005 The videos and DVDs belong to Prof. Glickman and will be at the reserve library. Most films are also available at the Cervantes Institute. Reading list and syllabus available in the Certificate Programs Office (Room 5109).
Mondays, 6:30pm to 9:30pm.

Seminar in Film Studies: Film Noir in Context:  From Expressionism to Neo-Noir  (Professor Morris Dickstein): This course will explore the style, sensibility, and historical context of film noir. After tracing its origins in German expressionism, French "poetic realism," American crime movies, the hard-boiled fiction of Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain, and the cinematography and narrative structure of Citizen Kane, we will examine some of the key films noirs of the period between John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon of 1941 and Welles’s Touch of Evil in 1958. These will include such works as Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, Out of the Past, Detour, Shadow of a Doubt, In a Lonely Place, Gun Crazy, The Killers, DOA, Ace in the Hole, The Big Heat, and Kiss Me Deadly. We’ll explore the visual style of film noir, the importance of the urban setting, the portrayal of women as lure, trophy, and betrayer, and the decisive social impact or World War II and the cold war. We’ll also examine the role played by French critics in defining and revaluing this style, and touch upon its influence on French directors like Melville (Second Breath), Truffaut (Shoot the Piano Player), and Chabrol (La Femme Infidele, Le Boucher). Finally, we’ll look at the post-1970s noir revival in America in such films as Chinatown, Blade Runner, Body Heat, and Red Rock West. Readings will include materials on the historical background of this style, key critical and theoretical texts on film noir by Paul Scrader, Carlos Clarens, James Naremore, Alain Silver and others, and the work of some hard-boiled fiction by writers such as Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, David Goodis, and Patricia Highsmith. Each student will be expected to deliver one oral report and to write a 15-page research paper.  
Wednesdays, 6:30pm to 9:30pm.

Seminar in Film Studies:  The Films of Luchino Visconti (Professor Joe McElhaney): A seminal filmmaker in the birth of Italian neo-realism, Luchino Visconti’s body of work (in film as well as in opera and theater) intersects with a number of major issues in relation to post-war European culture. This course will examine Visconti’s career from a variety of different perspectives and screen nearly all of his films. Crucial to the concerns of the course will be Visconti’s relationship to traditions of cinematic, theatrical and literary realism, traditions within which Visconti has often been a controversial figure. Much of this controversy revolved around what were often felt to be the excessive residual effects of a melodramatic sensibility on the form and structure of the films. Such charges have also been leveled against his process of adapting works from the canon of nineteenth and twentieth century European literature (Dostoevsky, Camus, Mann, Maupassant) in which "great literature" has often been reduced to either a purely illustrative or conventional dramatic function. But these theatricalizing and melodramatic elements are no less crucial and no less historically significant than realism for understanding Visconti’s filmmaking practice and its relationship to post-war art cinema. For Visconti, melodrama and the theatrical often existed in a dialectical rather than contradictory relationship to realism. Moreover, melodrama for Visconti was the very essence of the theatrical and the dramatic. Throughout the semester, close attention will be paid to the historical and cultural moments surrounding the production and reception of the films, with particular attention given to Visconti’s increased concern with questions of history and of historical and cultural decadence, and to the process of literary adaptation. Careful attention will also be paid to the precise form of the individual films themselves: camera movement, staging of action, performance, set and costume design, lighting, and music as well as other elements of the soundtrack. Visconti’s co-ordination of all of these leads to one of the most complex, imaginative and voluptuous visual styles in the history of cinema. Course requirements: Students are required to submit a final term paper of approximately twenty pages in length. The papers may address any number of issues in relation to the films. Close formal analysis is certainly encouraged but students are also welcome to do research on other matters, including the relationship between Visconti’s theater productions and his work in cinema; to explore Visconti’s relationship to the post-war Italian and European cultural scene; to address the films’ treatment of sexuality; to examine the implications of Visconti’s literary adaptations, and so on. This paper must be discussed with me in advance, followed by a formal written proposal of approximately two to three pages. Reading list and syllabus available in the Certificate Programs Office (Room 5109).  
Tuesdays, 4:15pm to 8:15pm.

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