Spring 2004

Course Descriptions

Development of Dramatic Structure (Professor Marion Holt): This course is designed to familiarize students with a range of dramatic structures as crafted and re-crafted in western theatre (for the most part). The primary objective is to expand our understanding of dramatic form and function, while helping to prepare students to negotiate their first-level exams. The course assumes both continuities and dis-continuities in structure across genres, theatrical styles, historical periods, and national theatres. Each week’s readings will consist of an assortment of plays and critical studies. There will be two short papers and a longer comparative one on other plays, as well as an essay exam, written in class on the day of the scheduled exam.
Mondays, 4;15pm to 6:15pm

History of Theatrical Theory (Professor Marvin Carlson): This course offers a survey of the most important and influential documents in the history of theatrical theory. Starting with the Greek philosophers, we will survey diverse theorizations of theatre and drama in order to analyze their underlying assumptions. Reading a range of theorists, we will focus on key concepts including mimesis, character, spectatorship, empathy, and the ethical and political efficacy of art. We will try, moreover, to read these theoretical texts in relation to theatre's changing function throughout history and to the development of dramatic conventions and literatures. A second focus of the class will be the study of the development of both poststructuralism and an identity-based hermeneutics--understood as representational and ideological systems--which have unquestionably become the lingua franca of theatre and cultural studies. This course will thus read the work of the classical theorists (including Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Castelvetro, Schiller, Schlegel, Strindberg, Artaud, and Brecht) in relationship to the writings of those contemporary theorists who have most provocatively questioned their assumptions and methods (including Jacques Derrida, Elin Diamond, Lynda Hart, Joseph Roach, and Richard Schechner). Thursdays, 2pm to 4pm.

History of Cinema I: 1895-1930 (Professor Heather Hendershot): This is a course in the history and historiography of the silent cinema. Weekly screenings represent technological and artistic developments from 1895 through the transition to sound. Topics include the rise of the Hollywood studio system and the relation of modernist movements in the arts to German cinema, Soviet cinema, and French avant-garde cinema. Selected essays by Sergei Eisenstein, Noël Burch, Thomas Elsaesser, Tom Gunning, and others accompany films seen in class and focus upon spectatorship and the emergence of "classical style." Thursdays, 6:30 pm to 10:00 pm.

Studies in Theatre: Opera and Theatre: Tangled Relations (Professor Judith Milhous): Opera can do almost anything theatre can do, and on a good night (which doesn’t happen as often as some of us would like), can do it better. This course will be more concerned with opera as a part of theatre than with opera qua opera. It is designed to help students study for the First Exam, so it will emphasize the kinds of connections that exam looks for. Examples will be chosen to cover as broad a range of theatrical history as possible, though not in chronological order. No knowledge of music or previous acquaintance with opera is necessary: I assume that many, even most, members of the class will have neither. We will therefore consider elementary topics such as the place of a given opera in its composer’s career (early/late, formula/experiment, success/failure) and its immediate theatrical context (sources; production information of all kinds; stylistic imperatives or departures therefrom). More importantly, each opera will be paired with at least one or more plays that represent the larger theatrical context, and with a relevant theoretical or critical essay. For example, Handel’s Xerxes (with excerpts from recordings of modern productions) might be read with Lee’s The Rival Queens and Racine’s Bajazet, and with selections from Said on Orientalism. These companion pieces will allow us to consider what was going on in theatre when the opera was first produced and/or what led to its story. When and why the opera has been revived will also get some attention. Ballet, which for much of its life was closely associated with opera, will be nodded at from time to time. The core of the class is to explore how, from time to time, each form has influenced the other, from the beginnings of opera in Renaissance Italy to the present. Some of the titles I am considering are: Wagner, The Ring; Rimsky-Korsakov, The Snow Maiden; Puccini, Girl of the Golden West; Dukas, Ariane et Barbe-bleu; Rameau, Les Indes Galantes; Cilea, Adrianna Lecouvreur; Britten, Peter Grimes; Gluck, Iphigenie in Aulide; Berg, Lulu; Adams, Nixon in China; and Sheng, Madam Mao. (Suggestions would be welcome.) I will post on my door a list of possible combinations, as I work them out. Among the operas on the syllabus will be several that will be done in the city during the semester, so those who wish can experience some of the works studied (e.g., Figaro, Mourning Becomes Electra, Xerxes). Requirements include a class report on one of the operas and two drafts of a term paper. Tuesdays, 2pm to 4pm.

Seminar: Studies in European Drama: The Theatres of Apollo & Dionysus: Studies in Marlowe/Shakespeare, Corneille/Racine, and Goethe/Schiller (Professor Felicia Bonaparte): The history of art and of criticism, and indeed of philosophy generally, has repeatedly distinguished two very different modes of thought, ways of knowing, kinds of art. Using Nieztsche’s "The Birth of Tragedy" as a starting point for our inquiry, and including other essays that comment further on this conflict (such as Schiller’s landmark work "On NaVve and Sentimental Poetry" which not only, in his view, distinguished Goethe’s art from his own but had an important influence on the development of Nietzsche’s thought) this course will explore this opposition—if indeed it proves to be one—in the work of six great dramatists in three different times and places. In the process we will be concerned to examine such ideas as: instinctual art, philosophic poetry, the war of the ancients and the moderns, the relation of form and content, the role of art in society and even more in civilization, the relation of art to religion, the relation of art to myth, the relation of myth to religion, the nature and function of paradigms, the question of an artistic language, the idea of a genre and its relation to an age, and the various ways in which all of these and many more reveal themselves in different eras and national literatures. Knowledge of a foreign language will not be required in this course but those who are able to read French or German will be encouraged to read the plays in the original if possible and, in reports and class discussions, to introduce the rest of the seminar to the subtleties not available in translations of these works. Wednesdays, 4:15pm to 6:15 pm Seminar in Film Theory (Professor William Boddy): This course will provide an overview of classical and contemporary film theory. Writers, whose contributions to the field will be examined, include Eisenstein, Arnheim, Epstein, Balazs, Bazin, Merleau-Ponty, and Kracauer, among the earlier figures, and such contemporary theorists as Metz, Mitry, Baudry, Mulvey, Heath, and Carroll. Questions about the structure and function of the filmic "text," the nature of cinematic representation and film spectatorship raised by various schools of thought, including phenomenology, Marxism, semiology, psychoanalysis, and feminism will be considered. Although attention is largely on primary theoretical writings, secondary texts and films that help to contextualize specific theories will be used as well. Wednesdays, 4:15 pm to 6:15 pm.   Seminar in Film Studies: Gay and Lesbian Experimental Studies (Professor Sarah Schulman): Gay and lesbian filmic images and perspectives are as old as cinema itself. This class will review the history of gay and lesbian experimental cinema from silents to modern day. We will also explore heterosexual icons of experimental film, like Reifenstahl and Deren, and their profound influence on subsequent lesbian and gay cinema. The class will focus on the differences between formal invention and conventional narrative structure, and the significance of this dynamic in understanding lesbian and gay expression and representation. Weekly screenings and discussion will include works by Edison, Weber and Watson, Williard Maas, Nazimova, Deren, Reifenstahl, Anger, Barbara Rubin, Jack Smith, Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Shirley Clarke, Andy Warhol, Curt McDowell, Barbara Hammer, Su Friedrich, Jim Hubbard, Jack Waters and Peter Cramer, and Todd Haynes. Guest lectures on film history and technique. Tuesdays, 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm.

Seminar in Film Studies: Alfred Hitchcock and His Legacy (Professor Robert Kapsis): This course examines Alfred Hitchcock’s career as well as his legacy, with special concern for how his influence is reflected in the contemporary thriller genre. In the first part, we will examine Alfred Hitchcock's motion pictures as well as his popular television series in relation to the network of influences which combined to produce them, including Hitchcock's personal eccentricities, the contexts of the thriller genre, the film industry, the film art world, and the wider society. In the second part, we will explore how Hitchcock's work has influenced the careers of important American directors, especially Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, and Steven Spielberg. The centerpiece of this course is Multimedia Hitchcock (MH)---a dynamic interactive computer program I originally developed for the Museum of Modern Art, as part of their celebration of the Hitchcock Centennial in 1999. Many written assignments will be based on materials drawn from the MH program.
Mondays, 6:30 pm to 10:00 pm.

Theatre and Popular Culture (Professor David Savran): For most of their long histories, theatrical entertainments have been closely associated with "the people," whether one defines that collective as the working-class, rural peasantry, urban proletariat, or even the white-collared middle class. From Roman comedy to the Elizabethan public theatre, from medieval farce to nineteenth-century melodrama, theatre routinely functioned as a popular cultural practice. With the consolidation of the binary opposition between highbrow and lowbrow at the end of the nineteenth-century, however, and with the unprecedented success of motion pictures in the following decades, most U.S. and European theatre forms became distinctly minoritarian (i.e., highbrow or upper-middlebrow) entertainments. This course studies the long and torturous relationship between theatre and "the people," with an emphasis on twentieth-century theatre practices in the U.S. The readings will include foundational texts for the analysis of popular culture (Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, Tony Bennett, Pierre Bourdieu), classic studies of popular entertainments (Bakhtin, Stallybrass and White), and histories of non-literary theatrical forms (burlesque, melodrama, vaudeville, minstrelsy, musical comedy). Tuesdays, 4:15 to 6:15pm.

Contemporary Latin American Theatre (Professor Gloria Waldman): Widely considered the most vital creative art form in Latin America today, both commercial and popular theatre has been a significant tool for examining contemporary reality. This seminar will examine major trends and directions in the contemporary Latin American theatre focusing on the following issues: critical attitudes towards the Latin American theatre; the meaning of the term "new theatre"; the dual commitment to social conscience as well as artistic expression; the artistic manifestation of a critical attitude towards the United States; the eternal dilemma between universal and national thematic directions; between the commercial and independent theatres; the importance of political and social theatre, new directions in contemporary Latin American theatre, including the phenomenon of the theatre festival, the collective creation, popular theatre, performance art and finally, who is the public who attends theatre in Latin America? The problems that the theatre movement faces in Latin America will be analyzed, including the technical and financial difficulties of staging a work, government censorship and its attendant self-censorship, the need to create one's own public, as well as the impossibility of earning a living solely from the theatre. Questions which have contributed to a spirited exploration of the theatre phenomenon in Latin America will be posed: What should theatre do? Be? Who is the Latin American public? What roles have critics and criticism traditionally played in fomenting--or thwarting-- an authentic theatre movement in Latin America? Why has theatre developed more in one country than another? Does Latam have a common scenographic language? Who does commercial theatre? independent theatre? The impact of foreign influences on the Latin American scene will also be examined and the degree to which these influences have been assimilated into their own national theatres: Brecht, Artaud, the Absurdists, Peter Brook, Peter Weiss, Albee, Pinter, Arrabal and Miller. We will examine a common assertion that Latin American theatre has not been an instrument for examining reality, but rather a consolation to the people for that reality. We will also explore the profoundly revolutionary nature of Latin American theatre in its aesthetics and thematics, where its practitioners daily respond to Federico Garcia Lorca's challenge, "To do theatre or to live theatre." We will read representative plays in English (and in Spanish for those who can) and attend theatre productions at INTAR, The Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre, Duo Theatre, Thalia and Spanish Repertory Theatre. Tuesdays, 4:15 to 6:15pm.