Spring 2010

Course Descriptions

Seminar in Theatre History and Production:  History of Scenic Design (Professor Marvin Carlson): This course will cover the major trends and leading theorists and practitioners of theatrical stage design in the West from Renaissance to the present. A wide selection of visual material from the program slide collection will be shown in the class, which will take place in a computer classroom. Blocks of related visual material will also be made accessible through each student’s graduate center computer account. There will be approximately three (3) classes devoted to Renaissance and 17th century design, one (1) on the 18th century, three (3) on the 19th century and six (6) on the 20th century.  During the term each student will prepare biographical studies of two designers, one twentieth century and one non-twentieth century. There will be a final examination based on identification of selected images.
Tuesdays, 2:00pm 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, 2:00 pm to 4:00pm.

Seminar in Comparative Drama:  Early Modern European Theatre (Professor Judith Milhous):This course is designed to survey the drama of Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Denmark, and Russia, with perhaps an overnight in England, from roughly 1550 to 1800. We will look at theatrical systems, at genres, and at exchanges from one country to another, to see how various forms spread across the continent. Some major theories peak and begin to decline. This 250-year period also includes the beginning of national theatres, of opera and ballet, and, toward the end, of the bourgeois drama.  Plays will be chosen with an eye to preparation for the First Exam. Informed participation in discussion, a class report on a set topic, and a 20-page term paper on a topic chosen by you and approved by me will be the basis for grading.
Thursdays, 2:00pm to 4:00pm

Seminar in Theatre History:  Advanced Theatre Research (Professor David Savran): This course is designed to provide students who have passed their first examination with a survey of the historiographic and theoretical methodologies that have proven most important for theatre and performance studies. 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. Encouraging students to become fluent in these critical languages, the course aims to prepare them to frame their dissertation topics, conduct original research, and select the methodologies most useful for interpreting and elaborating on their research. The written assignments and in-class presentations will 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.
Tuesdays, 4:15pm to 6:15pm

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 mimesis, truth and the real, representation, genre, verisimilitude, sensibility, theatrical theorizing of periodizations (i.e. classical, romanticism, modernism), and audience reception. Similarly, we will use a modular approach to studying critical/cultural theory from other disciplines and from theoretical movements. For example, these disciplines may include anthropology, sociology, and philosophy, and theoretical movements may include formalism, semiotics, phenomenology, structuralism, post-structuralism, postcolonialism, feminism, and queer theory. The modular approach will facilitate ongoing dialogues about the evolution and application to theatre studies and theatrical theory of key theoretical ideas emerging from these movements and disciplines. These may include, for instance, ontology, metaphysics, presence, simulacra and simulation, the politics of the visible, surrogation, performativity, construction of class and nationhood, biopolitics, identity, affect, and intra- and interculturalism.  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.
Mondays, 2:00pm to 4:00pm

History of American Theatre:  The Post-60s Musical (Professor Elizabeth Wollman): The American stage musical has always enjoyed populist appeal and an ability to reflect the changing sociocultural moods of the nation. In recent decades, the musical has undergone a number of monumental changes as a result of economic, technological, social, and aesthetic developments, all of which have affected the demands of a changing audience. While the American musical is not dead (despite frequent insistences to the contrary), it is most certainly very different than it was a half-century ago.  This course is designed for graduate students who seek greater understanding of the American commercial theater industry, the cultural life of New York City, and the changing cultural moods of the country as reflected in the American stage musical in the decades since World War II. Sessions will be devoted to the examination of some of the more important developments that have affected the stage musical in the past half-century. Topics for discussion include economics, advertising and marketing, theater technology, the importance of location and of space, trends in theater spectacle, the influence of contemporary popular music, the relationship of the American stage musical to the mass media, and the musical’s reflection of race, class, and gender.
Wednesdays, 4:15pm to 6:15pm

Seminar in Film Studies:  Film History II (Professor William Boddy): This course will explore major developments in US and global film culture from the introduction of sound to the advent of the “blockbuster” era in Hollywood in the mid-1970s. We will analyze works from a number of national cinemas, artistic movements, and creative auteurs, including Fritz Lang, Jean Renoir, Howard Hawks, Roberto Rossellini, Abe Polonksy, Jean-Luc Godard, and Martin Scorsese. Topics addressed include the problem of film authorship, the development of film genres and aesthetic styles, and the relationship of the classical Hollywood studio system to alternative models of film production in the United States and elsewhere. Emphasis will be placed on the historical, aesthetic, and ideological contexts of the films examined. Required Text: David Cook, A History of Narrative Film fourth edition (New York: Norton, 2004).  Course Requirements: In addition to participation in seminar discussion, each student will prepare brief response papers to the films and readings each week, and will write a 15-18 page research paper on a topic approved by the instructor. Topics and tentative screenings: Early sound film: M/Blue Angel; Hollywood genre film of the 1930s: Scarface, Bringing Up Baby; Inter-War political documentary: Land Without Bread, Spanish Earth; French poetic realism: Crime of M. Lange, Rules of the Game; Neorealism: Rome, Open City; Hollywood melodrama: Written on the Wind; Hollywood Noir: Big Combo/Out of the Past/Touch of Evil/Gun Crazy/Detour/Big Heat/Criss Cross/Force of Evil; Hollywood Western: Man from Laramie/Ranch Notorious/Johnny Guitar;French New Wave: Breathless, A Married Woman/Two or Three Things/Hiroshima Mon Amour/Night and Fog; Cinema Novo: Antonio das Mortes; European art cinema: Red Desert/Blow Up/Innocence Unprotected;New German Cinema: American Friend/Maria Braun;New Hollywood: Chinatown/Mean Streets/Badlands/Night Moves;US avant-garde film: Meshes of the Afternoon, Scorpio Rising/Riddle of Lumen.
Thursdays, 11:45am to 3:15pm

Seminar in Film Studies: The Western Gaze (Professor Marc Dolan): This course will examine the rise, fall, and perhaps second rise of one of the most popular American narrative genres of the 20th century: the Western. The course will begin with an examination of the parallel development during the nineteenth century of the Western as a visual genre in landscape painting and as a narrative genre in popular fiction. These two nineteenth-century traditions both influenced early silent film in the U.S., as the American film industry moved to California from the East Coast and the West became more a site of myth than honest memory. In studying what followed this transition, central consideration will obviously be given to the genre’s (re-)construction of both American manhood and American foreign policy, but we will also give consideration to the Western as a purely aesthetic genre—particularly in relation to landscape, where one may speak in both media of something like a “Western gaze.” To encourage this more aesthetic approach, specific assignments and class sessions will be structured around shooting locations. We will begin with a session on New York and New Jersey (the original West of American cinema), then move to the then-fresh California settings of such early independent efforts as The Squaw Man and The Battle of Elderbush Gulch), then to such favored silent settings as Newhall (Hell’s Hinges) and Chatsworth (The Iron Horse). A session on the backlot-focused Westerns of the early sound era will also focus on the Western musical (Destry Rides Again and Roy Rogers’ Utah). Next we will turn to the postwar return to location shooting, in angsty Tuscon (Winchester ‘73/Red River/3:10 to Yuma) and sparsely peopled Moab (My Darling Clementine/Once upon a Time in the West). After a brief consideration of the late 60s vogue for antiheroic Durango (Butch Cassisy & the Sundance Kid/The Wild Bunch), we will consider the so-called anti-Westerns of the post-Vietnam era, so many of them shot in the presumptively elegiac Northwest, including Oregon (Paint Your Wagon/Dead Man) and Montana (Heaven’s Gate/The Ballad of Little Jo), even British Columbia (McCabe and Mrs. Miller/The Grey Fox) and Alberta (Unforgiven) Readings will be drawn from: John Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique; David Lusted, The Western; Scott Simmon, The Invention of the Western Film; Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation; and Janet Walker, ed., Westerns: Films through History. There are three requirements for this course: (1) active participation in discussions, including periodic reports on individualized viewing assignments; (2) a brief presentation of original scholarship on some aspect of the Western that we have not considered in depth in this course, to be given late in the semester and (3) a 20-25-page seminar paper that treats that original scholarship in greater detail.
Fridays, 11:45am to 2:45pm

Seminar in Film Theory (Professor David Gerstner): This course explores the ways in which filmmakers and scholars Theorize the issues of film form and content. Since the advent of the cinema in the late nineteenth century, a great deal has been written bout it in terms of its aesthetic properties as well as its political-ideological possibilities.Through close readings of both the films and writings of major theorists (many who make film) we will consider what is at stake (aesthetically and politically) in the production of film. Readings may include: Bazin, Eisenstein, Münsterberg.Hartmann, Arnheim, Panofsky, Kracauer, Benjamin, Metz, Mulvey, Doane, Gunning, Bergstrom, Wollen, Deleuze, Godard, Vertov, Sobchack, J. Stewart, L. Williams, Modeleski as well as selected writings from Cahiers du Cinèma, Movie, and Tel Quel. Students are expected to complete weekly writing assignments, deliver a presentation, and complete a 15-20 page paper.
Tuesdays,11:45am to 3:45pm

Seminar in Film Studies: The Cyborg Effect/Affect (Professor Peter Hitchcock): Science fiction film and literature have conventionally explored the theme of what makes a human human. The cyborg builds and bends such conventions by denoting that contestable terrain between the human subject and technoscience. Much cyborg culture wants to present this space as liminal and liberating--as a fantasy that is indeed simply representable. Yet when that assumption is made the outcome is either deeply conservative or conventional in the negative sense. Rather than explore cyborgian space as a simple opposition between humanism and posthumanism, this course will examine key films, literature and theory in order to engage critically the mode of narrativity cyborg films conjure. One recurrent theme will be to analyze the production of cyborgian special effects in contradistinction to the more complex (non) representational aesthetics of affect. This will require consideration of major affect theories, particularly those of Spinoza and Tomkins. In addition, I would also want to trace the genealogy of cyborg and labor through the figure and figuration of automata and what I am calling automata affect, in which the body becomes technologized and dispersed in circuits, systems and networks. The latter approach proves particularly provocative in the study of cyborg anime. For many critics the cyborg has always been a symptom of the cinematic apparatus itself, the techné, as it were, of the “kino eye.” The tendency, however, has been to collapse its utopian aspects into modernity’s promise rather than to explore the collocation of ‘borg and body as modernity’s question or pause. A tension exists between the cyborg as bodily extension and as fearfully bodiless affect. This is not simply an endgame of humanist discourse (the resolution of affect in favor of the body) but an impasse in the logic of capital and cinema. The conceptual arena of the cyborg therefore becomes a struggle not just over modernity’s futures but also over the persistence of cinema itself within this trajectory. By exploring different aspects of cyborg effect/affect this course aims not only to provide an introduction to the importance of the cyborg in cinema but also to facilitate a greater understanding of the interaction/interface of the body and technology in general. Course Requirements: a class presentation and a 20-25 page final paper. It is hopedthe class presentation may provide a research base for the term paper. Supplementary visual submissions are encouraged. Individual essays in the course material will be uploaded to library reserves. For the most part, films will be seen outside of class time although clips will be used extensively. Reading and screening list available in the Certificate Programs Office (Room 5109).
Wednesdays, 2:00pm to 5:00pm

Seminar in Film Studies: Cinema and Madness (Professor Edward Miller): With its fixation on the illogic of dream sequences and unlikely juxtapositions, cinema has long succumbed to the allure of madness, perhaps most notably in the works of Hitchcock, Lang, Bergman, Cronenberg, and Lynch. This course investigates the relationship between film and madness, charting a theoretical history. Following Foucault in Madness and Civilization and Deleuze & Guattari in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia the course takes an anti-psychiatric stance toward madness, viewing it as a description with political and historical dimensions, rather than an affliction of singular, flawed psyches. In addition we provide counter-readings of some of the most famous case studies in psychoanalysis, such as the memoirs of Judge Schreber (misread by Freud as the rantings of a paranoid homosexual) and the fantasies of schizophrenics as described by Victor Tausk.The course pays particular attention to three disparate contemporary artists whose work is informed by expressions of madness: Guy Maddin, Zoe Beloff, and Ryan Trecartin. Guy Maddin revisits silent cinema and German expressionism in order to infuse his films with displays of aberrant psycho-sexual behavior. Zoe Beloff mines film and psychiatric history in order to re-stage the spectre of female spiritualists and hysterics (and patients), often using 3-D in order to lend her films both depth and ghostliness. Ryan Trecartin uses postproduction techniques to show the madness of the digital everyday, one in which his characters change names, voices, genders, and appearances with the ease of a double-clicked computer mouse. Trecartin and Beloff will be invited to present their work.Other films viewed in the course include: Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), Hobb’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (2006), Van Sant’s Last Days (2005), Caouette’s Tarnation (2003), Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), Cassavetes’ A Women Under the Influence (1974), Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), Litvak’s The Snake Pit (1948), Deren’s Meshes of an Afternoon (1943), Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne D’Arc (1928), and Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness (1926). The key text of the course is Patrick Fuery’s Madness and Cinema (2003). We also read selections from Giorgio Agamben (“Notes on Gesture”), Stephen Heath (“The Cinematic Apparatus”), Jacques Lacan (from The Psychoses), Slavoj Žižek (from Enjoy Your Symptom), Joan Copjec (“The Anxiety of the Inflencing Machine”), Jacques Derrida (“Cogito and the History of Madness”), Fredrich Kittler (from Gramophone Film Typewriter), Kaja Silverman (from The Acoustic Mirror), Vicky Lebeau (from Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Play of Shadows), and Fleming and Manvell (from Images of Madness). A paper proposal is due just before the middle of the semester. Research papers are 15-20 pages and the final session of class is structured like a conference in which students both present their work as well as serve as moderators and respondents.
Tuesdays, 4:15pm to 8:15pm

                                                            back to top