Spring 2009

Course Descriptions

History of Theatrical Theory (Professor Jean Graham-Jones): This course has two objectives: 1) to introduce students to theatrical theory, and 2) to examine other theories that have influenced contemporary theatre, performance, and cultural studies. We will begin with a general discussion of what constitutes theatrical theory and then proceed modularly to examine such key theatrical and performance concepts as representation, mimesis, 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, deconstruction, feminism, and cultural theory, as well as other disciplinary approaches—coming from, for instance, anthropology, sociology, and psychology—that have transformed theatre studies. Students will complete two projects, one due at midterm and the other due by the end of the semester; a brief oral final exam will also be given.
Thursdays, 4:15 pm to 6:15pm.

Seminar in A Dramatic Genre: 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 in part to help students study for the First Exam, so it will emphasize the kinds of connections that exam looks for. Examples will be chosen, from the active repertoire when possible, 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, if any; stylistic imperatives or departures therefrom). More importantly, each opera will be paired with at one or more plays that represent the larger theatrical context, and with a relevant theoretical or critical essay. For example, Handel’s Xerxes might be read with Lee’s The Rival Queens, Racine’s Bajazet, and selections from Said on Orientalism. Such companion pieces allow us to consider what was going on or had recently gone on in theatre when the opera was first produced, as well as when and why a given opera has been revived. Ballet, which for much of its life was closely associated with opera, will get a nod from time to time. The point of the class is to explore how each form has influenced the other, from the beginnings of opera in Renaissance Italy to the present. Some of the pieces I have used include: Wagner, The Ring; Rimsky-Korsakov, The Snow Maiden; Dukas, Ariane et Barbe-bleu; Rameau, Les Indes Galantes; Cilea, Adrianna Lecouvreur; Britten, Peter Grimes; Gluck, Iphigenie in Aulide; Berg, Lulu; Sondheim, Sunday in the Park with George, and Sheng, Madam Mao. (Suggestions are welcome, before the end of the semester. To be honest, I accepted some last time, but rejected others.) Requirements: include an oral report on one of the operas on the syllabus, a short written report on an opera performance of your choice, and a term paper, either on a subject related to this course or as part of an on-going project.
Thursdays, 2:00pm to 4:00pm

Seminar in Theatre Theory: Sociology of Theatre (Professor David Savran): Despite the fact that social scientists and theorists have long attempted to analyze different forms of cultural production, few have focused on theatrical practice or the theatre as an institution. This course will examine the methodologies of the most celebrated and influential social theorists, charting the development of sociological approaches to culture and, in particular, to theatre. We will survey the work of theorists who have tried to answer questions about cultural hierarchies, the class composition of audiences, the economics of the performing arts, the politics of production and consumption, the history of taste, the ideological specificity of different media, and the role of culture in achieving (and questioning) capitalist globalization. Although emphasizing the work of Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu, the course will be roughly chronological. After an introduction to sociology as a discipline, readings will include the work of the Frankfurt School (Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht), the Birmingham School (Stuart Hall, Tony Bennett, Colin MacCabe), as well as more recent attempts by theatre scholars to theorize the political economy of theatre and performance. Finally, we will critically examine the work of Marxist postcolonial theorists to analyze how culture operates in what Samir Amin calls “actually existing capitalism,” the system that continues to deepen economic polarization globally. Assignments will include the submission of a discussion question every week, a five- to eight-page book review, and a fifteen-page final research paper.
Tuesdays, 4:15pm to 6:15pm.

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 in recent years. The course aims to help students become proficient in these critical languages and to prepare them for framing their dissertation topics, conducting original research, and selecting the theoretical models most useful for interpreting and elaborating upon their research. Reading and written assignments will help students in the process of formulating field statements and book lists for the second examination and provide suggestions and guidance in the selection of a thesis topic or area, in planning the organization of the thesis, and in beginning to prepare the theoretical and methodological groundwork for writing the thesis. The theoretical, historiographic, and methodological strategies emphasized will be those which seem most likely to be relevant to the projected project of the students enrolled in the seminar.
Mondays, 4:15pm to 6:15pm.

History of American Theatre: American Theatre Practice and Theatrical Modernism (Professor Claudia Case): This course will explore the production models and aesthetic development of theatre companies that influenced the direction of Modern American drama and theatre. Particular emphasis will be placed on the creative role of the producer, and how the unique intermingling of financial and aesthetic concerns influenced American theatre practice. Students will explore the strategies different companies used to compete in the marketplace, and how these strategies created not merely competing operational practices, but competing visions for the American theatre itself. Particular attention will be paid to the operations of the Syndicate, the Shuberts, the Provincetown Players, the Washington Square Players, the Lafayette Players, the Theatre Guild, the Group Theatre, the Civic Repertory Theatre, the Federal Theatre Project, the Playwrights Producing Company, and ANTA. In particular, we will study the relationships between groups (such as the development from the Washington Square Players to the Theatre Guild to the Group Theatre), and examine the production practices associated with particular companies. Throughout the course, we will be asking whether any of the theatres under consideration approximate the idea of an American national theatre, and whether such a theatre is desirable or even possible in the United States.
Tuesdays, 6:30pm to 8:30pm.

Theatre and Society: Global Political Theatre and Performance (Professor Maurya Wickstrom): Global Political Theatre and Performance will begin with a look at historical instances of primarily European/American theatre that has been called political. These may include examples such as Ibsen, Shaw, early feminist pageants, Agit-prop, Workers’ Theatre, Reinhardt, Brecht, Piscator, Romaine Rolland, Meyerhold, Joan Littlewood, Odets, Dario Fo and Franca Rame, Boal, the Living Theatre, Arnold Wesker, Edward Bond, the Joint Stock Company and so forth. Spurred by questions generated about the politics of these, we’ll move on to the greater part of the class, which will be spent on questions around political theatre in the present. These are a sampling of the kinds of questions we’ll explore. The question of what is political theatre will be a constant one. We’ll ask how has it been variously imagined, practiced, theorized, how has all this changed through time, and why. What are existing assumptions about the politics and desires that motivate what is identified as political theatre? What are various articulations of assumptions, or hopes, about its interventions in the social? What is the contemporary range of circumstances in which it gets made, or in which it seems necessary. Who is making it, and in relation to who else, and for what kinds of intended audiences? When and why do artists identify their work as political and when and why not? What are the relationships that political theatre has to the State in which it is made? When and why is it censored, when is it funded or not? What is its relationship to the increasingly transnational cultural production apparatus, and how is that apparatus linked to global economy? What is its relationship, for instance, to “cosmopolitanism?” When does theatre become “political” and how, when we consider it specifically as an aspect of global economic forces? Is Theatre for Development, for instance, political? In what ways? What are the specific relationships various kinds of contemporary political theatre imagine with regard to the local, the state, and the transnational? What are questions of scale within political theatre? What kinds of spaces does it occupy? If we study a range of political positions that occur within political theatre today, how might that help to formulate what is understood by politics today? Is there a way to push on the very concept of what the political is? What are emerging understandings of perhaps a different kind of political that we might theorize as occurring or possible through theatre? To use Badiou’s term, what appears in contemporary political theatre? Readings for the course will include a selection of plays and articles that cover approaches to and practices of political theatre from many different global regions. We’ll also read excerpts from new books by Baz Kershow (Theatre Ecology: Environments and Performance Events), Alan Read (Theatre, Intimacy and Engagement: The Last Human Venue), Gilbert and Lo (Performance and Cosmopolitics), and excerpts from many other books, which may include, for instance, The Performance Arts in Africa: A Reader, The Politics of Cultural Practice, Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance Activism and Pedagogy, Actors and Activists: Politics, Performance and Exchange Among Social Worlds, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre, To All Appearances: Ideology and Performance, The Radical in Performance: From Brecht to Baudrillard, Theatre Matters: Performance and Culture on the World Stage, Electoral Guerilla Theatre: Radical Ridicule and Social Movements, Theatre in Prison: Theory and Practice, Radical Street Performance, Community Theatre: Global Perspectives.
Wednesdays, 2:00pm to 4:00pm

Seminar in Film Studies:  Science Fiction in Film and Television (Professor Heather Hendershot): This class examines the historical evolution of science fiction, with a primary focus on American film and television. We will consider issues of aesthetics, authorship, and genre (in particular the complicated interrelationship between sci-fi and horror), while also contextualizing discussion within the broader framework of the political issues raised by the films under discussion. In particular, we will examine the genre’s historical push-pull between a conservative fear of “the other” and a more progressive allegorical use of the genre to explore issues such as racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and McCarthyism. Students will consider key early shapers of the genre, such as Fritz Lang (Metropolis, Woman on the Moon), then move on to examine the explosion of science fiction during the Cold War years. Films viewed from the post-war era may include: Invasion of the Body Snatchers, It Came from Outer Space, The Man from Planet X, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Forbidden Planet. Next, we will turn to the 1960s, a transitional period aesthetically, technologically, and politically, as seen in films such as Andromeda Strain, Planet of the Vampires, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. The class will also examine key dystopic films of the 1970s such as A Boy and His Dog, Planet of the Apes, and Soylent Green. The film component of the class culminates with Alien, Blade Runner, and Starship Troopers. Television programs discussed will include: The Twilight Zone, the new Battlestar Gallactica, and the Star Trek franchise, with forays, where appropriate, into Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a breakthrough show in terms of both its political use of allegory and its manipulation of genre paradigms (horror, sci-fi, fantasy, comedy, the musical). Our discussion of the Star Trek franchise will lead us into examination of the important roll that fandom has played in the history of American science fiction. We will focus in particular on the work of writer/producer Ronald D. Moore, who got his start on Star Trek: The Next Generation, hit his stride with Deep Space 9, and boldly went where no man had gone before with Battlestar Galactica. Readings will include: Bukatman, Blade Runner; Hills, Fan Cultures; Jenkins, “Out of the Closet and into the Universe: Queers and Star Trek”; Jenkins, “Welcome to Bisexuality, Captain Kirk”; Kuhn, ed. Alien Zones: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Films; Lucas, “U-I Sci-Fi: Studio Aesthetics and the 1950s Metaphysics.”; Rickman, ed. The Science Fiction Film Reader; Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster.” In addition to weekly readings, to prepare for most classes students will also be required to see a film on their own ahead of time. We will also view a film in class each week. Students will complete two assignments, a short (5-7 page) study of the marketing and reception of a single film not studied in the class, and a longer (15-17 page) final original research project. The topic of the final project will be formulated in consultation with the instructor.
Thursdays, 4:15pm to 8:15pm.

Seminar in Film Studies: Queer Culture, Theory and Media (Professor David Gerstner): This course studies the ways queer cultural producers engage a range of media to explore questions of identity (sexuality, race, gender, class, nation). The relationship between queer cultural identity and media is complex—particularly as it is filtered through a global economy—and, as such, finds its expression through a dynamic use of multi-mediated platforms. With readings from queer theorists as our backdrop and through analyses of film, video, literature, novels, poetry, dance, and other media-arts, we will consider the varied and diverse contours that generate queer media and the artists involved in their production. Students are expected to complete weekly readings, weekly writing assignments, deliver a 15-20 minute presentation, and submit a 15-page final paper. Readings for the class may include: Abelove, Henry, et.al. The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader; Anzaldùa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera; Baldwin, James. Another Country; Dyer, Richard. Now You See It; Gever, Marth, et.al. Queer Looks; Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place; Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. Queer artists we may study include: David Wojnarowicz, Marlon Riggs, James Baldwin, Yvonne Rainer, Cheryl Dunye, Barbara Hammer, Audre Lorde, Riyad Wadia, Jean Genet, Peter Wells, Cui Zi’en, Emile Devereaux, Gloria Anzaldùa, and others. Course open to Ph.D students only. Permission of instructor required for all others.
Tuesdays, 4:15pm to 8:15pm.

Seminar in Film Studies:  Theatricality in Film (Professor Ivone Margulies): This course on theatricality in film presents the main arguments on the distinction between theatre and film. The course asks how certain traits of theater--such as enhanced physicality, visible proscenium, spatial convergence, marked blocking, excessive gesture, emphasis on text, tableau formations, direct audience address—bring into cinema a reciprocal framing of "natural" and "artificial." We will examine what, in modern cinema, distinguishes sincerity from artifice, audience from scene, catharsis from distanciation, one version of the self from another. The course discusses dramaturgical analogies for social interaction (the notion of social front and stigma in Goffman); forms of confession and acting out (in psychoanalysis and in psychodrama); the association of theatricality and femininity; the notion of liminality. The course explores films involved in farce and disguise; the relation of cinema verité with psychodrama and confessional modes; films which use the theater as the setting to dramatize processes of self-transformation and ritual possession; how acting is used to question notions of artifice and sincerity; the relation of reenactment and moral exemplarity in film; the use of extended dialogue in film and how it inflects the film’s presentational format and didactic thrust. Assignments: Class Presentations: Each student will make a short 15 min presentation on the topic of theatricality and cinema—raising relevant formal and reception distinctions between theater and film as well as points of contact between the two forms of expression. The presentations should bring up questions for class discussion. Topics may be related but not restricted to the ones of the final research paper. You may use as your examples film adaptations such as Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street, or examples brought up by Bazin in his essay “Theater and Cinema.” Class presentations begin on the 4th week class. (worth 15% of the grade)-Two page proposal for the final paper. (due on 6th class –worth 15% of the grade);-Final Paper: (worth 70% of the grade). Choose a film and discuss how it articulates issues of sincerity or duplicity, and how it appropriates formal tropes from the theater to establish different levels of reality and illusion. (around 20 double spaced pages) You may use any of the class required or recommended readings as your theoretical or historical background. Additional research is a must. Required readings: The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life Erving Goffman;“Theater and Cinema, Part I and II” André Bazin in What is Cinema vol I; “Paradox of the Comedian” Denis Diderot. “On the Impression of Reality in the Cinema” Christian Metz in Film Language; “The Cinema of Attractions Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant Garde.” Tom Gunning. Michael Fried “Theatricality and Objecthood.” All assigned readings are on reserve in the library. Syllabus and reading list available in Certificate Programs Office (Room 5109).
Wednesdays, 4:15pm to 8:15pm.

Seminar in Film Studies: Film History II (Professor Jerry Carlson): This course will outline and investigate main trends in world cinema from the coming of sound until the reorganization of Hollywood by the “blockbusters” of the mid-1970s. The course will use a number of case studies in national cinemas to explore how new aesthetics, technologies, ideological perspectives, and modes of production and reception have reshaped and enriched storytelling in feature films. Of particular interest will be the ways post-war cinemas challenge and alter the notion of classical Hollywood genres as developed and practiced by the American studios in the 1930s and 1940s.The course will emphasize the close reading of films by such major directors as Charles Chaplin, Howard Hawks, Jean Renoir, John Ford, Orson Welles, Vittorio de Sica, Billy Wilder, Yasujiro Ozu, Stanley Donen, Jean Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, Roman Polanski, and Andrei Tarkovski. The course is organized by a selection of films that illustrate key phenomena of the period. The topics under consideration include, among others, the cultural functions of the genre system, the development and influence of Italian Neo-Realism, the uses of self-reflexivity to investigate the impact of cinema upon the 20th century, and the rise of international art cinema with the emergence of the director as an “auteur.” A number of recurrent questions will inform the course. What is the role of “authorship” in the cinema? Why and how do film styles change? How are films shaped by their contexts of production and reception? Why do particular film movements or national cinemas become influential? How does Hollywood respond to international challenges to its dominance? And how do cultural, social, and political forces relate to a medium that frequently claims innocence as “just entertainment?” Students are expected to attend all screenings and lectures, to prepare the readings on time, and to hand in assignments on the designated dates. There will be a brief analytical paper and a longer research essay. Details of these assignments will be discussed in class. Assigned Texts Bordwell, D. & Thompson, K. Film History: An Introduction (2nd ed) Geiger, J. & Rutsky, R. L. Film Analysis: A Norton Reader Information: jcarlson@ccny.cuny.edu.
Mondays, 6:30pm to 9:30pm.

Seminar in Film Theory (Professor Amy Herzog): This course will provide an overview of significant movements, debates, and figures in film theory. Readings will span both classical and contemporary film theory, addressing a range of approaches including realism, structuralism, auteur theory, genre criticism, psychoanalytic film theory, feminist and critical race theories, third cinema, film-philosophy, and new work on digital cinema. We will examine writings on cinema in their historical and national contexts, looking at the ways in which film theory intersects with political, cultural, and aesthetic trends. Class discussions and written projects will focus on close analysis of both written and filmic texts, and students will be required to view films each week outside class. Course Requirements: Response Paper (5 pages): 20% Participation: 10% Presentation: 10% Research Paper (15-20 pages): 60% Screenings: Students will be required to watch one film before class each week. Additional films will be screened in class, along with clips to be viewed for close analysis. A list of recommended films will be provided, and students will be invited to attend occasional screenings relevant to the course material at venues in the city. Text: Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism, 6th Ed. (NY: Oxford University Press, 2004) Additional readings will be available via electronic reserve. Syllabus available in the Certificate Programs Office (Room 5109).
Mondays, 2:00pm to 5:00pm.

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