This course surveys the history of world film from cinema s precursors to 1945. We will develop methods for analyzing film while examining the growth of film as an art, an industry, a technology, and a political instrument. Topics include the emergence of film technology and early film audiences, the rise of narrative film and birth of Hollywood, national film industries and movements, African-American independent film, the emergence of the genre film (the western, film noir, and romantic comedies), ethnographic and documentary film, animated films, censorship, the MPPDA and Hays Code, and the introduction of sound. We will conclude with the transformation of several film industries into propaganda tools during World War II (including the Nazi, Soviet, and US film industries). In addition to contemporary theories that investigate the development of cinema and visual culture during the first half of the 20th century, we will read key texts that contributed to the emergence of film theory. There are no prerequisites. Students are required to attend screenings or watch films on their own.

CANCELLED

"When industry erupts in the sphere of art," Baudelaire famously wrote in 1859, "it becomes the latter's mortal enemy, and in the resulting confusion of functions none is well carried out...If photography is allowed to deputize for art in some of art's activities, it will not be long before it has supplanted or corrupted art altogether...Photography must, therefore, return to its true duty, which is handmaid of the arts and sciences." History has not been kind to this argument. First, Henry Fox Talbot and many of his contemporaries attributed the photographic image to nature, not industry, and the same is true of a number of contemporary artists. Second, by 1842--three years after the official invention of photography--photographers had already begun hand-coloring their daguerreotypes, and a century and a half later Richter started smearing and spattering paint onto small photographs, and exhibiting them along with his abstract and figurative paintings. By the mid-1850's, many artists were also painting from photographs, sometimes by projecting them onto their canvases, and treating these projections as preparatory drawings. They called the resulting images photo-paintings. And although it became increasingly "disreputable" to work in this way as the century progressed,

Topics vary from year to year.

In this course we will consider the oeuvre of the South African novelist and Nobel Prize-winner, J.M. Coetzee and the literary, theoretical, and political issues it raises. The primary reading list will include Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country, Waiting for the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K, Foe, Age of Iron, The Master of Petersburg, Disgrace, the memoirs Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime, and Diary of a Bad Year. We will also study Coetzee’s wide-ranging academic writing, which addresses issues like the relationship between literature and history, authority and authorship, confession, censorship, torture, gender and sexuality, realism and autobiography, animal rights and environmentalism, the nature of the “classic,” translation, and more. We will examine Coetzee’s complex, elusive, and critical relationship to South Africa (his attitudes towards apartheid, colonial discourse, the state, etc.), as well as his significance in the broader international context: his relationship to writers like Kafka, Beckett, Nabakov, Dostoyevsky, and, more generally, to modernism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism. The Coetzee seminar, in short, will be of interest to all graduate students: it is virtually a proseminar. Modernists, eighteenth-century specialists, comparatists, postcolonialists, feminists, and Africanists are all welcome. Note that this version of the course will also consider Coetzee's long-standing interest in cinema and film theory, his screenplay, some failed film versions of his books, and, hopefully, the promising new film of Waiting for the Barbarians starring Mark Rylands, Jonny Depp, and Gana Bayarsaikan. Requirements: an oral presentation on an assigned topic and a final essay on a topic of the student’s own choosing. Coetzee's work and the debates it has fueled present ideal opportunities for individualized research and archival work; seminar participants will also be able to draw inspiration from Coetzee scholars, who will occasionally come in for invited presentations and conversation.<br />

This course takes up the question of reading South Asian Literature both as a collection of diverse literary cultures, as well as the basis for a methodology of reading that takes language, region, and history into account. It takes as a starting point recent work that foregrounds the importance of South Asian language literatures, and their complex interactions, to an understanding of South Asian literary history, as well as critiques of the concept of world literature that question its underlying assumptions and frequent reliance on cosmopolitan languages such as English. In what ways can we describe the many complex interactions between literary cultures in South Asia, rooted in specific historical contexts, reading practices, and cultural expectations, while maintaining attention to language and literary form? How, in turn, can we begin to think of these literatures in interaction with larger conversations in the world? With these considerations in mind, we will examine works of criticism dealing with both modern and pre-modern literatures, primarily but not exclusively focused on South Asia. Topics will include the concept of the cosmopolis in literary and cultural history, the role of translation, the transformations of literature under colonialism, and twentieth century literary movements such as realism and Dalit literature. Readings may include works by Erich Auerbach, Frederic Jameson, Aijaz Ahmad, Gayatri Spivak, Aamir Mufti, Sheldon Pollack, David Shulman, Yigal Bronner, Shamshur Rahman Faruqi, Francesca Orsini, Subramanian Shankar, Sharankumar Kimbale, and Torlae Jatin Gajarawala. We will also examine selected works, in English and in translation, as case studies for discussion. This course is intended both for students who intend to specialize in the study of South Asia, as well as for those who focus on questions of comparative literature more broadly.

The seminar will consider Hannah Arendt's early Jewish writings. It will then center on Arendt's major work, The Origins of Totalitarianism (in particular, the sections on &quot;Antisemitism&quot; and &quot;Imperialism&quot;). Finally, we will discuss Arendt's controversial study on Eichmann in Jerusalem. <br />
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