Reading the Nineteenth-Century Gaze (Chang)

From Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” to Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, the nineteenth-century encompasses a wide range of writings which complicate ideas of looking and representation. The course will draw upon an eclectic range of materials in trying to get at how nineteenth-century Britons saw themselves seeing, and wrote about those forms of seeing. Travel narratives, early photographic manuals, and art reviews will connect with contemporary fiction, poetry and prose—including the Pre-Raphaelites, Ruskin and Thomson—as source material for our investigations. We will also read widely in current visual theory including works by Mitchell, Jay and Crary.

Introduction to Film: 1945 to the present (Hearne)

This course covers the development of cinema as a social and cultural institution and as an art form from the post–World War II period to the present. We will focus primarily on American film (both Hollywood and independent) with an emphasis on how these films developed in dialogue with other national cinemas.

Our topic for the course is “Memory and Morality.” Building on the themes of morality, respectability, and censorship in early film history (the topic for English 1810 in the fall semester), we will focus on the way filmmakers in the second half of the twentieth century have revisited the moral issues regulated by the 1934 Production Code—specifically representations of sexuality, race, violence, and crime—by “remembering” and revising earlier images and genres.

We will begin by discussing the impact of World War II on American and international filmmaking with a unit on “War, Trauma, and Memory” in films such as Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959). Our discussions will encompass the idea of memory as a subject of the films and also as a way that filmmakers have returned to and re-worked Hollywood’s earlier genre conventions, moral codes, and censorship restrictions. The decades of the 1950s and 1960s saw a slow erosion of the 1934 Production Code and its eventual replacement in 1968 with the CARA (Classification and Ratings Administration) system, a shift that radically altered the relationship between cinematic representations and public memory. We will consider the way Westerns spanning this period, such as Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), and later films such as Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), offer an extended meditation on violence and the memory of violence in American history and on American movie screens. Finally, we will address the return to the themes of early crime films and to film noir stylistics in movies that explore the connections between memory and identity, including Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), Coppola’s The Godfather Part II (1974), Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), and Soderbergh’s The Limey (1999). Course requirements include short papers and midterm and final exams.

Genres: Documenting Culture (Hearne)

How do films interpret culture for viewers? We will begin this course by discussing the tensions between realism and fiction and between ethnographic and popular genres in films such as Nanook of the North (1922) and King Kong (1933). We will also explore the shifting representations and ideological implications of cinematic spectacles, experimental techniques, primitivism, tourism, video and community activism, and indigenous filmmaking. Films will include works by Robert Flaherty, Meriam Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, Maya Deren, Jean Rouch, Ousmane Sembene, John Marshall, Zacharias Kunuk, Tracy Moffatt, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Dennis O’Rourke, and others. Critical readings will cover theoretical and historical perspectives from the fields of documentary film studies, visual anthropology, post-colonial studies, and Native American studies. Assignments include short response papers, a research paper, and a presentation.

Native American Film and Video (Hearne)

This course offers a historical overview and critical exploration of films and videos by Native American and First Nations directors, producers, writers, and actors. The past few years have seen a flowering of indigenous filmmaking, with the release of major feature films such as Chris Eyre’s Smoke Signals (1998) and Skins (2002), and Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) (2002). Important but less widely publicized recent films include Jorge Manzano’s Johnny Greyeyes (2000) and Randy Redroad’s The Doe Boy (2001). What forces—artistic, historical, political, and cultural—are behind this seemingly sudden outpouring? We will begin by briefly examining the cinematic context for the emergence of Native American filmmaking with discussions of Western and documentary genres. Later units will focus on Native American actors and directors in the silent film industry, activism and the cultural documentary, and film adaptations from novels and short stories. Discussions will focus on the style, technique, history, and ideological impact of the films, balancing our close reading of visual and verbal nuances with attention to larger historical and political contexts. Assignments will include weekly response papers, a final research paper, and a presentation.

Introduction to Film Analysis (Hearne)

This course introduces students to the basics of film aesthetics, including units on mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, narrative, sound, color, and genre. Balancing our focus on technical elements with broader frameworks, we will also consider various critical, theoretical, ideological, and historical approaches to film studies and to the practice of writing about film. Students will write frequent response papers, several longer papers, and essay exams.

Constructions of Race and Gender in American Film (Prahlad)

This course will focus on the uses of dialogue and lighting to inscribe racialized and gendered images in American films. In other words, what are some ways in which social categories such as "black," "white," "man," and "woman" are invented and/or reaffirmed in film? How does the use of lighting, the interplay between light and dark, shadow and substance, in specific films serve as visual narratives about whiteness and blackness in America? How does cinematic conventions of dialogue create woman-ness and male-ness, either perpetuating or challenging established ideas? How do we read these narratives and what do they say? What are some of the relationships between racial and gendered constructions in film, and how does sexuality play into these? How have they changed or remained stable over the decades from the early twentieth to the early twenty-first century? This course will examine these questions through a survey of common film genres, including the western, action films, drama, comedy, and science fiction. Readings for the course will include poetry, film criticism, and reviews. The course will consist of lecture, discussion, and the viewing of films and film segments. Generally speaking, films will be screened on Monday evenings, and Wednesdays will be devoted to discussion.

The American West (Piper)

Frederick Jackson Turner called the frontier "the line of most rapid and effective Americanization," a place where settlers shed their European histories and became "American." This course will examine the ways in which notions of American identity have been historically dependent upon the concept of a "West." In addition to our reading, we will consider popular images of the American West in both A- and B-Westerns, looking at the way in whichfilm helped construct the idea of an "American West." In contrast to the "open space" myth of the West, we will examine the laws and land surveys that mappedout the West, from the Homestead Act to the reservation system. In contrast to the notion that the West produces "rugged individualism," we will examine the impact of the federal government and the realities of the water, railroad, and cattle empires. We will also investigate the multicultural history of the American West, looking at Mexican-American, African-American, and Native American literatures.

Postcolonial London (Piper)

This course focuses on new ethic fiction from London, discussing the way that postcolonial authors who have emigrated from Commonwealth countries are now revising the concept of “Englishness” within England. We will also look at problems of globalization and national identity, racial conflict, and the racialization of space within London. Working with recent developments in both postcolonial studies and urban theory, we will examine those communities that are often left out postmodernist accounts of the city, redefining London as an emerging postcolonial metropolis. We will be reading books such as Timothy Mo's Sour Sweet, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome, and Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories. We will also look at short stories and theoretical texts in Writing Black Britain and Black Skin, White Masks. Finally, we will watch a selection from the growing list of films focusing on black Britain such as My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammie and Rosie Get Laid, and Secrets and Lies. The intersections between fiction and film by black British authors, whoareoften also filmmakers, will be a focus of this course.

Screening the Novel (West)

How do we talk about a film adaptation of a novel? The most common approach is to measure the success of the movie by how closely it comes to capturing the “essence” of the original text. Typically, viewers grumble when a director changes the ending, adds a plot twist, cuts a character. But such complaints are hardly fair, for they’re based on the problematic assumption that cinema, while a different medium altogether, must nevertheless do just what a novel does. In recent years, film scholars like Robert Stam and Brian McFarlane have developed new means of approaching film adaptation, encouraging students to think about literature and film as two different mediums each trying to tell a “story” in their own way. They also emphasize the importance of studying film adaptations within their historical and cultural contexts.

In this advanced undergraduate course, we will study these recent approaches to adaptation by focusing on six novels and several of the movies that have been adapted from them. The course begins with Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, a hard-to-describe book (part novel, part autobiography, part journalistic account) that served as the basis for an even harder-to-describe film, Spike Jonze’s Adaptation. Released last year, Adaptation raises fascinating questions about the role of the screenwriter in Hollywood, and about which kinds of stories can be told by mainstream cinema and which cannot. Our course will then move backward in time, focusing on a nineteenth century novel—Dickens’s Great Expectations—that has been adapted for the screen repeatedly. We will study several of these adaptations within their historical and cultural contexts, discussing, among other topics, the role Dickens’s novels played in transforming Hollywood movies into prestige products. Once we finish our study of Great Expectations, the class will divide into several research groups, each group choosing one of three other nineteenth-century novels that have been adapted repeatedly for the screen: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Students will be required to give a group presentation on film versions of these novels, selecting not only from Hollywood feature films but from foreign films, animated films, and silent films as well.

Following these presentations, we will turn to James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity and Billy Wilder’s 1944 film version of the same title. Together, these two provide one of the rare instances in which a film version is considered to be far superior to its literary original. For our last case study in the course, we will focus on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and the Pullitzer prize-winning novel that “adapted” it, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, which was itself adapted into an Oscar-winning motion picture in 2002. Together, these three works raise fascinating questions about how artists respond to each other’s work across the boundaries of time and medias.

Written requirements for the course include one group presentation, 4 short papers, and one long research paper on a topic of the student’s choosing.

L.A. Fiction and Film (Piper)

Los Angeles is generally portrayed as a place of both promise and deception, a “paradise” awaiting apocalypse. It is a city that was literally built by its “boosters,” or those who advertised its supposed wonders to people in the Midwest and back East. But it is also a city that inspired the genre of “noir”—depicting bleak and inescapable corruption. This class will look at how these two contradictory representations of the city emerged at the same time, in film and fiction, examining the ways in which the city has been both promoted and demonized from its inception. We will examine the environmental consequences of building a city in the desert, as well as the history of racial tensions within the city. We will look at what “Los Angeles” means in the national imagination and in the lives of its residents. Finally, we will discuss the impact of Hollywood on L.A. dwellers and writers. Writing Los Angeles will be the main text for this course—it covers literature, journalism, and film history. We will also be reading or viewing some noir, science fiction, andblockbuster depictions of Los Angeles.

Dickens, Hardy, and the Victorian Visual Imagination (West)

This graduate seminar will study Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy—the two figures widely acclaimed as Victorian England’s most visual novelists--through the lens of two media: nineteenth-century illustration and cinema.

The first half of the course will be devoted to studying the relationship between text and illustration in several of Dickens’ and Hardy’s novels. Among a range of topics, we will investigate the collaboration between Dickens and noted illustrator George Cruikshank, a collaboration that quickly emerged as a rivalry between author and illustrator for control over what scenes and subjects would be represented from the fiction. We’ll also discuss Hardy’s collaboration with photographer Hermann Lea for the illustrations to the 1912 Wessex edition of Hardy’s novels. And, as we end this unit, we will address the issue of how these illustrations, along with photography, optical gadgets, and spectacular entertainments like stage melodrama and panoramas, can be read as proto-cinematic media.

The second unit of the course will be focused on film adaptations of these authors’ novels. In recent years, film scholars like Kamilla Elliot and Brian McFarlane have developed new means of approaching film adaptations, encouraging readers to think about literature and cinema as two different mediums each trying to tell a “story” in their own way. These critics also emphasize the importance of studying film adaptations within their historical and cultural contexts. In keeping with these approaches, we will look at a range of adaptations from different time periods, studios, and directors, asking how these films alter, comment on, and critique the texts they adapt. Just as importantly, we will address the issue of how and why the “classic” novels of Dickens and Hardy were enlisted at specific moments in history: around 1911, when the move from single-reel to feature-length films in Hollywood required “respectable” subject matter for the screen; after 1934, when the establishment of the Production Code demanded that Hollywood produce “morally upright” films; and during and immediately after World War II when the devastation wrought in England propelled the British film industry to produce films that would stir national pride.

The novels we will read are Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Other texts include Dickens and the Dream of Cinema (Manchester University Press, 2003), Dickens on Screen (Cambridge University Press, 2003) , and a coursepacket of critical and theoretical readings. Written requirements include six short (2pp.) papers and an eight-ten page paper, the latter paper to be presented at a mini-conference organized by the participants in the course.

Studies in 19th-Century British Literature: "Romanticism and Visual Culture” (Heringman)

This course introduces graduate students to the study of Romanticism by way of the many fruitful relationships established between verbal and visual media in the period. A significant portion of the course is devoted to the works of William Blake, whose poems are composite works of art equally remarkable for their text, their images, and the book form in which he produced them. Blake's writings on art, Lessing's Laokoön, and Reynolds' Discourses will be some of our sources on the aesthetic theory of an age in which poetry and painting were often viewed as "sister arts." Blake's involvement with literary illustration will introduce us to another topic of the course, the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, a remarkable and ambitious commercial venture for linking visual culture to the literary canon. We will also consider Wordsworth's poetic critique--in The Prelude and elsewhere--of the picturesque aesthetic and of spectacle in popular culture. In a unit on Ann Radcliffe, we will consider her more positive relationship with the picturesque in The Romance of the Forest, as well as issues of taste and scenic design raised by stage adaptations of her novels. A unit on political cartoons will return us to the synergy of word and image, a major critical and theoretical focus of the course. We turn next to a substantial unit on the controversy over the Parthenon sculptures, a controversy ignited by their arrival in England in 1807. This debate provides a valuable framework for understanding major poems by Keats, Shelley, and Hemans, as well as the rising claims of professionalism in the arts. The course concludes with a reading of Blake's Jerusalem (1804-1820), arguably his masterpiece in the verbal-visual genre he invented, the illuminated book.