Spring 2008

Course Descriptions

History of Theatrical Theory (Professor Maurya Wickstrom): This course has two objectives: to introduce students to theatrical theory and to examine other theories that have influenced contemporary theatre and cultural studies. The course will begin with a discussion of what constitutes theatrical theory and then proceed modularly to examine such key theatrical and performance concepts as representation, mimesis, character and identity, genre, and audience response. A modular structure will allow us to follow and create ongoing dialogues about these concepts as they have evolved. The second objective of the course will be met through, again, a modular approach to the presentation and discussion of such influential critical/cultural theories as formalism and structuralism, semiotics, post-structuralism, feminism, and post-colonialism, as well as other disciplinary approaches—coming from, for instance, anthropology, sociology, and psychology—that have transformed theatre studies. Requirements include two projects: an annotated bibliography and a short research paper, one due at midterm and the other due at the end of the semester, as well as a 15-minute individual oral examination at the end of the course. Only a few texts will be ordered; most readings will be placed on reserve.
Wednesdays, 2:00 pm to 4:00pm.

Seminar in Theatre History: Advanced Theatre Research (Professor Marvin Carlson): This course is designed to provide students who have passed their first examination with an in-depth study of the theoretical and historiographic methodologies that have proven most important for theatre and performance studies. The course aims to help students become fluent in these critical languages and prepare them to frame their dissertation topics, conduct original research, and select the theoretical models most useful for interpreting and elaborating on their research. The theoretical readings will cover a broad range, such as cultural materialism, sociology, and feminism, as well as the methods associated with postcolonial and performance studies. The historiographic readings will focus on questions of the reliability and value of evidence, contextualization, periodization, and the relation of theatre studies to other disciplines. The written assignments aim to help students formulate field statements and book lists for the second examination and prepare them to organize the kind of intervention required of a dissertation.
Mondays, 4:15pm to 6:15pm

Seminar in a National Theatre:  Classicism, Root and Branch (Professor Judith Milhous): Twentieth- and twenty-first century playwrights as diverse as Thornton Wilder, Wole Soyinka, Charles Mee, and Hélèn Cixous have reinterpreted Greek and Roman plays for their contemporaries. Oedipus and Electra are among the most popular candidates for reworking. Many playwrights have used stories from classical literature and history as the basis for plays constructed according to “classical” tenets. Racine and Goethe are familiar examples, but many others did the same thing, as well as or (very occasionally) better than the masters. This course is designed to encompass a selection of Greek and Roman plays—the roots—and a group of variations on each theme—the branches. The branches include more-or-less direct imitations, complete make-overs, inversions, and patterns the writers identified as classical. I use the word “play” for convenience; examples of opera, dance, and film will also come up in our readings and discussions. The point is to explore the ramifications of the words “classical” and “adapation,” among others. I will chose ancient plays by several criteria. The largest impulse is to give you a broad, rather than a narrow, impression of the drama of Athens and Rome. Some choices imply others: the Electras and the Medeas offer different direct comparisons. But one can also work backwards, as it were, from Heaney and Müller to Sophocles, from Soyinka and the Performance Group to Euripides. I expect to avoid a number of the more familiar possibilities, preferring to expand your horizons rather than repeat plays you already know too well. While I have a whole syllabus worth of choices from past versions of the course, suggestions from you now will be welcome, as I hope to learn something, too. I will post a booklist around the end of the semester, so you can be chasing texts; although there are translations (if not always the best) online. Each student will be responsible for leading the discussion of two plays in one session during the semester. A term paper (20-25 pp.) on a topic of your choice, approved by me, is an obvious seminar requirement. People who have ongoing projects may want to work on them; others may want to develop a topic from some story covered in the readings, though you should not restrict yourself to the plays listed on the syllabus. Consultation is of the essence.
Thursdays, 2:00pm to4:00pm.

Seminar in Theatre History and Productions:  Theatre and Theatricality in Renaissance Art and Architecture (Professor James Saslow):  "All the world's a stage" wrote Shakespeare, and all the arts of the early modern era were profoundly imbued with metaphors, images, and techniques of the theatre. This lecture course will examine the interrelations between the performing and visual arts from ca. 1300-1750, when dramatic performance and the buildings to house it developed the forms we know today. In tandem with literature and architecture, painting, sculpture, and graphic art explored theatricality through naturalistic narratives that aimed to involve the viewer as if they were dramas, with the picture frame assuming the same role as the proscenium. From sacred drama performed in or around churches like Giotto's Arena Chapel, through the court masques and operas of the Baroque, to the emerging commercial popular theatre of Hogarth's London, this course ranges in scope from literal to metaphorical: from theatre “proper" (spaces dedicated to performance) to the ephemeral art of festival and pageant, to architecture and decoration that aimed to theatricalize other activities, and to theatricality as subject matter and metaphor in the visual arts. In addition to providing a chronological overview, the course will emphasize several broad interdisciplinary themes: secularization, patronage, political uses of theatrical self-display, and theatre as material culture (the intersection of art and technology). While designed to meet the needs of students in Theatre, Art History, and Renaissance Studies, the course will also cut across these fields: for however academia may categorize them today, in Renaissance culture the art of theatre and the theatricality of art were inextricable. Course requirements: Regular attendance and weekly readings. Choice of a final examination or a research paper (ca. 15 pages) on a topic approved by the instructor; interdisciplinary research encouraged.
Mondays, 2:00pm to 4:00pm.

Special Topics in Theatre and Popular Entertainment:  Unnatural Acts:  Women Performance Art (Professor Annette Saddik): During the late 1960s and early 70s, women’s performance art evolved in conjunction with the feminist movement, positioning women as speaking subjects in the theater as opposed to passive objects for visual consumption. By both foregrounding and resisting their status as sexual objects, women performance artists subverted expectations and played with patriarchal ways of constructing the role of “woman” on stage. When Carolee Schneemann performed her piece “Interior Scroll” in 1975, standing nude in front of her (mostly female) audience in ritualistic body paint and slowly pulling out a rope-like “text” from her vagina that she began to “read,” she was commenting on the different ways in which men and women are constructed to experience the world differently, writing from their sex as a point of departure. For women, whose bodies have traditionally been seen as passive sites for the projection of cultural anxieties and desires, the stage became a perfect arena for representing the contradictions of the fragmented social, physical, and psychic experience imposed by a patriarchal culture. Since performance art guarantees the presence of the artist and puts the body on display, it became an especially relevant art form for feminists during the 1980s, when American culture was dealing with both the recent benefits of the political, artistic, and sexual freedoms won during the 1960s and 70s, as well as the challenges of the AIDS crisis. By the 1990s, a new conservativism in America, the evolution of the “culture wars,” and the related NEA controversy that led four performance artists (Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, John Fleck, and Tim Miller) to sue the U.S government, brought performance artists to the attention of mainstream culture, leading to both outrageous misconceptions and a new respect for this unconventional art form. The performance artists we will be studying in this course use the spectacle of the female body as an active, desiring body to reveal and question the codes of heterosexual femininity, or what it means to “be a woman” on the stage in American culture, as they explore the hegemonic constructs surrounding gender and the complex ways in which language and silence serve to both create and reflect these constructs. We will be using theorists such as Philip Auslander, Jill Dolan, C. Carr, Vivian Patraka, Elin Diamond, Lynda Hart, and Peggy Phelan to inform our readings of the work of various women performance artists–Faith Wilding, Carolee Schneemann, Annie Sprinkle, Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, Deb Margolin, Robbie McCauley, Lisa Kron, Anna Deavere Smith, Split Britches, The Five Lesbian Brothers, The Guerrilla Girls–in order to explore how these artists expose the invisible power relations that function in a patriarchal society and challenge the relationship of women to the dominant system of representation. Primary Texts: Extreme Exposure, ed. Jo Bonney. Split Britches: Lesbian Practice/Feminist Performance, ed. Sue-Ellen Case. Out From Under: texts by women performance artists, ed. Leonora Champagne. A Different Kind of Intimacy: The Collected Writings of Karen Finley, Karen Finley Shock Treatment, Karen Finley. George and Martha, Karen Finley. “Make Love: a performance by Karen Finley,” TDR: the journal of performance studies 47:4 (Winter 2003). Of All the Nerve: Deb Margolin Solo, ed. Lynda Hart. The Well of Horniness, Holly Hughes. The Lady Dick, Holly Hughes. Angry Women, ed. Andrea Juno Video of Mondo New York. Critical Theory: Books: The Explicit Body in Performance, Rebecca Schneider. Acting Out: Feminist Performance Art, ed. Lynda Hart and Peggy Phelan. The Twentieth-Century Performance Reader, ed. Michael Huxley and Noel Witts (excerpts). Critical Theory and Performance, ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (excerpts). Performativity and Performance, ed. Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (excerpts). Gender Trouble, Judith Butler (excerpts). Essays: Case, Sue-Ellen, “A Case Concerning Hughes.” TDR: the journal of performance studies 33:4 (Winter 1989). Forte, Jeanie. “Women’s Performance Art: Feminism and Postmodernism.” Theatre Journal 40:2 (May 1988). Hart, Lynda. “Motherhood According to Finley: The Theory of Total Blame.” TDR: the journal of performance studies 36:1 (Spring 1992). Phelan, Peggy. “Serrano, Maplethorpe, the NEA, and You: ‘Money Talks’.” TDR: the journal of performance studies 34:1 (Spring 1990). Rapaport, Herman. “‘Can You Say Hello?’: Laurie Anderson’s United States.” Theatre Journal 38:3 (October 1986). Schechner, Richard. “Karen Finley: A Constant State of Becoming.” TDR: the journal of performance studies 32:1 (Spring 1988). Schneider, Rebecca. “Holly Hughes: Polymorphous Perversity and the Lesbian Scientist.” TDR: the journal of performance studies 33:1 (Spring 1989). Schuler, Catherine. “Spectator Response and Comprehension: The Problem of Karen Finley’s Constant State of Desire.” TDR: the journal of performance studies 34:1 (Spring 1990). Assignments: Two essays and an oral presentation are required for this course: Essay #1 (7-10 pages): 30% Oral presentation: 30% Essay #2 (15-20 pages): 40%.
Wednesdays, 4:15pm to 6:15pm.

Seminar in a National Theatre:  Color Struck: African American Theatre and Performance in the Early Twentieth Century (Professor James Wilson): Theatre and performance played an essential role in articulating and reflecting the political, social, and artistic struggles of African Americans in the first part of the twentieth century. Black leaders and intelligentsia of the era, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Johnson, and Alain Locke, were in agreement over the importance of black theatre, but they were at odds over its propagandistic and aesthetic functions. Thus, the inter- and intra-racial tensions about an “authentic” black art provoked (and continue to provoke) theoretical disputes around modernism, primitivism, and pluralism in the early twentieth-century. In this seminar, we will pursue these issues through plays and performance texts from the early 1900s through the 1930s. Titles will include, but will not be limited to, Shipp and Dunbar’s In Dahomey, Du Bois’s Star of Ethiopia, Grimké’s Rachel, Burrill’s Aftermath, Thurman’s Harlem, and Hughes and Hurston’s Mule Bone. While historically contextualizing the works, class discussions will focus on the texts as they represent a range of dramatic genres, such as the folk play, anti-lynching drama, satirical comedy, and Broadway melodrama. We will also examine black pageants, diasporic folk dance concerts, and musical revues. The course will conclude with a look at how these works influenced playwrights and performers of later decades of the twentieth century. Contemporaneous criticism and theoretical treatises will provide the tools for interpreting and historicizing the texts, and students will be asked to weigh these against recent multidisciplinary scholarship and theory in African American studies (including the work of Henry Louis Gates Jr., Paul Gilroy, Houston Baker Jr., Cheryl Wall, Hazel Carby, Michael North, and others).  Writing assignments for the course will consist of responses to the reading 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, 4:15pm to 6:15pm.

Film History I (Professor Alison Griffiths): Film History I provides students with an overview of precinema, early cinema and silent film, considering American filmmaking and European national cinemas. Beginning with an examination of nineteenth century philosophical toys and the serial photography of Edward Muybridge and Etienne Jules-Marey, the course traces the development of film from 1894 through to the advent of sound in 1927. Following an analysis of early film (pre-1907), including the work of Edison, Porter, the Lumière Bros., Meliès, Pathé, and members of the Brighton School in the UK, the course takes up the major figures of Griffith, Vertov, Eisenstein, Dreyer, and Vidor, who were critical in exploring the creative possibilities of film form in the silent era. Topics covered during the second half of the course include: Weimar cinema, Soviet filmmaking, Hollywood silent comedy, American “race” cinema of the 1920s, early documentary film, and the 1920s international avant-garde. Course requirements: In addition to four reading response papers (2-3pp), and an oral presentation of the final research paper, students are required to conduct original research on a topic approved by the professor and submit an 18-20pp final paper. Required Texts: Lee Grieveson and Peter Kramer, eds., The Silent Cinema Reader (London: Taylor and Francis, 2003). Richard Abel, ed., Silent Film (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996). Antonia Land with Ingrid Periz, Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writing on the First Fifty Years of Cinema (London: Verso, 2006) List of readings and supplemental readings available in Certificate Programs Office (Room 5109).
Wednesdays, 6:30pm to 9:30pm.

Seminar in Film Studies:  Sound in Film:(The Wor(l)d in Pieces) (Professor Marc Dolan): This course will examine the long evolution of sound in film through the early 1930s. We will begin with an extended examination of ongoing experiments in synchronized sound film from the 1890s through the early 1920s (e.g., Gaumont’s Chronophone films, Oskar Messter’s shorts), as well as a consideration of the sounds that normally accompanied film production and exhibition during the so-called “silent” era. The bulk of the course, however, will be focused on the adaptations to sound made by industries and artists throughout the world during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Issues discussed will include: the debate over live sound vs. pre- and post-recording; the resurgence of theatricality and mise-en-scene in the cinema after decades of emphasis on crosscutting and editing; the development of asynchronous sound as a deliberate artistic technique; the standardization and genericization of musical underscoring; dialogue, dubbing, and the de-internationalization of cinema; and the nationalization and institutionalization of censorship in the age of the synchronized soundtrack. Readings will be drawn from: Donald Crafton, Talkies; Scott Eyman, The Speed of Sound; Henry Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts?; Richard Abel and Rick Altman ed., The Sounds of Early Cinema; as well as Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov’s classic essay “Statement on Sound.” List of films to be viewed available in Certificate Programs Office (Room 5109)
Fridays, 11:45am to 2:45pm.

Seminar in Film Studies:  The Horror Film (Professor Heather Hendershot): This course surveys the history of the horror film, from its roots in the gothic novel to its more recent manifestations in the slasher film and the new Japanese, Korean, and Thai ghost films. We will consider issues of gender and spectatorship by drawing on Carol Clover’s Men, Women and Chainsaws and Barry Keith Grant’s The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. The horror film’s critique of the ideology of the family will be discussed via Robin Wood’s writings, and the issue of fandom will be examined by drawing on Matt Hill’s The Pleasures of Horror. The class will also examine industrial and economic forces which have shaped the horror film such as the fall of the studio system and the rise of gimmicks such as 3D; to this end students will read Kevin Heffernan’s Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror films and the American Movie Business 1953-1968. Finally, a key goal of the class will be to examine the issue of taste and the horror film’s simultaneous status as “trash” and “art,” the relationship between cult and camp, and the high/low aesthetic of Italian giallo films. For this part of the class we will read excerpts from Joan Hawkins’ Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde as well as: Jeff Sconce’s “‘Trashing’ the Academy: Taste, Excess and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style”; Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp”; and Mark Jancovich’s “Cult Fictions: Cult Movies, Subcultural Capital and the Production of Cultural Distinctions.” One film will be screened in class each week. For most classes we will discuss two films, and students will be assigned one of the films to view before class. I will also provide a list of recommended films. Students will complete one major assignment for the class, a 20-25 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. Listing of required and recommended films available in Certificate Programs Office (Room 5109).
Thursdays, 4:15pm to 8:15pm.

Seminar in Film Studies: African Cinema, North and South  (Professor Peter Hitchcock): Although films have been made in Africa since the 1920s, it is only since the great independence movements in the middle of the century that significant African cinemas began to emerge in their own right. In part, African cinema aesthetics developed through specific political dimensions precipitate in the socio-economic conditions of decolonization and nationalist expression. African cinema’s further provocation unfolds in the ways in which it has built on traditional narrative story-telling forms (not just oral tales in general, but unique genres, like those of the griot). Rather than being only a basic introduction to the main trajectories of African film making, this course will focus on particular examples of African cinema that demonstrate both the interventions and the contradictions of its art in recent years. In addition, we will consider the creative schisms between cinema of sub-Saharan Africa and that of North Africa (the films of the latter are too often elided in an understanding of continental expression). The class will investigate to what extent an African visual style is possible as a distinctive aesthetic (north and south, and given the vastly different cultural histories of the continent) along with the necessity to “Africanize” and transform cultural codes associated with Western technology and expansion. Profoundly dialogic, African cinema tends to project an answerability (responsibility) according to a complex set of micro and macrological contexts. Finally, we will also come to terms with the impact of new technologies on African film form and substance, particularly video and digital video.Films will include: Wend Kuuni (Kabore, 1982), Hyenas (Mambety, 1992), Guimba (Sissoko, 1995),Mandabi(Sembene), Keita (Kouyate, (1995) Monday’s Girls (Onwurah,1993), Rachida (Bachir, 2002), Ali Zaoua (Ayouch, 2000), and al Massir (Chahine, 1997). Readings will be drawn from Ukadike (1994), Diawara (1995), Bakari and Cham (1996) Malkmus and Armes (1991), Ukadike and Gabriel (2002) Armes (2005) plus selected essays on postcoloniality, “third cinema,” and the international film industry.Course requirements: class presentation and a final paper of 20-25 pages (visual extras optional).
Wednesdays, 2:00pm to 5:00pm.

Seminar in Film Studies:  Constructivism and Cinema:  The Films of Podovkin, Eisenstein and Vertov (Professor Stuart Liebman): this course will focus on the complex artistic and ideological relationships between selected films and theoretical writings by Kuleshov, Pudovkin, Eisenstein, and Vertov and many central cultural monuments and spectacles in the Soviet Union during the first decade after the revolution. Films to be analyzed in detail will include Eisenstein's Strike [1924-5], October [1927-8], and The General Line (Old and New) [1928], Pudovkin's Mother [1926] and The End of St. Petersburg [1927], and Vertov's Kino Glaz [1924], One Sixth of the World [1926], The Eleventh Year [1928], The Man with a Movie Camera [1929] and Enthusiasm [1931]. These works will be examined in the light of aesthetic debates among the Constructivists and Productivists, including Rodchenko, Gan, Arvatov, the Vesnin Brothers, the Stenberg Brothers, Malevich and Tatlin in the visual arts, as well as literary and theatrical artists and critics such as Trotsky, Shklovsky, Eichenbaum, Tretyakov, Mayakovsky, and Meyerhold. Readings will include primary texts by all of the names mentioned, as well as select secondary sources. After some orienting lectures, the course will be conducted as a seminar with a presentation and term paper required. Draft syllabus available in the Certificate Programs Office (Room 5109).
Tuesdays, 4:15pm to 7:15pm.

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