This introductory survey course will explore the history of television as both a site of cultural production and a particular technology within an audiovisual technological continuum. Special attention will be paid to practices of representation and how issues of race and gender have been entangled with not only televisual representations but the creation of new technologies and mediums, including the internet and digital and social media. We begin the course with some debates on technological and cultural approaches to media, including arguments about the limitations of describing a particular technology as “new” or “digital.” This course will also address: Should we approach “television” as an industry and content provider or as a technology and set of audience relations? How have television audiences been transformed by algorithmic cultures and streaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu? Are algorithms “neutral” components of digital media, or are they also enmeshed in histories of representation and their embedded biases? How have social networks provided more freedom to digital media users and at the same time increased concerns about surveillance?
Main navigation

This introductory survey course will explore the history of television as both a site of cultural production and a particular technology within an audiovisual technological continuum. Special attention will be paid to practices of representation and how issues of race and gender have been entangled with not only televisual representations but the creation of new technologies and mediums, including the internet and digital and social media. We begin the course with some debates on technological and cultural approaches to media, including arguments about the limitations of describing a particular technology as “new” or “digital.” This course will also address: Should we approach “television” as an industry and content provider or as a technology and set of audience relations? How have television audiences been transformed by algorithmic cultures and streaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu? Are algorithms “neutral” components of digital media, or are they also enmeshed in histories of representation and their embedded biases? How have social networks provided more freedom to digital media users and at the same time increased concerns about surveillance?

This course will focus on questions of gender difference and of sexual desire in a range of literary works, paying special attention to works by women and treatments of same-sex desire. More fundamentally, the course will introduce students to questions about the relation between identity and representation. We will attend in particular to intersections between gender, sexuality, race, class, and nation, and will choose from a rich vein of authors: Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, the Brontes, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, Radclyffe Hall, Willa Cather, Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Rhys, James Baldwin, Sylvia Plath, Bessie Head, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Cherr�e Moraga, Toni Morrison, Michael Cunningham, Dorothy Allison, Jeanette Winterson, and Leslie Feinberg.

Caribbean Literature

This course will explore the emergence of modern science fiction as a genre and the ways it has reflected our evolving conceptions of ourselves and the universe. We will explore sci-fi as not only the future-mythos of a technological civilization, but as a space for cultural, social, and political critique of the modern age. We will discuss such characteristic themes as utopias, the exploration of space and time, biological engineering, robots, aliens, and other worlds, contextualized within the history of science and alongside themes like gender, race, and class. Authors include: H. G. Wells, Le Guin, Herbert, Clarke, Asimov, Okafor, Delany, Chiang, and others.

This course examines intersections of artistic production and radical politics in the 20th and 21st centuries. It addresses art from across a wide array of media: street art, film, theater, poetry, performance art, fiction, graphic arts, digital media, and urban interventions. We will examine artistic movements and artists from across the Americas, including revolutionary Latin American theater, film, and literature; the art of Black Liberation in the U.S.; the Chicano art movement and its queer dissidents; street performance and protest produced in the context of dictatorship; anticolonial performance art and alternative reality gaming; and activist art, political theater, and cinema from the 21st century. Through its focus on the relationship between art and politics, this course also introduces students to foundational concepts related to the relationship between culture and power more broadly.

What do we talk about when we talk about love? Is love just empty talk, or the stuff of dreams offered by novels, poems and plays? Can literature and film, if they contribute to the emotional swindle of popular romance, address our anxieties about the untruth of love? Raymond Carver’s title (“What we talk about when we talk about love”) sends us back to disabused times, a moment when love seemed debased, reduced to weak sublimation or mindless satisfaction. The Freudian thesis is that we only love our parents under different disguises, and use the noble word of love only because we must sublimate our murderous impulses, but there is an even longer history of cynical accounts of love. This class will explore the theme of love when it ceases to be taken for granted and has to be understood in a critical perspective. We will tackle the theme with the help of Plato’s Symposium, Freud on the psychology of love, Peter Sloterdijk on ancient and modern cynicism, and Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love. We will discuss Aristophanes’ plays Lysistrata and Women in Parliament, Chi-rak, Spike Lee’s 2015 version of Lysistrata, Edith Wharton’s critique of marriage in Custom of the Country, Carver’s stories, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, Beckett’s “First Love” and Play, and the “comedy of remarriage” The Awful Truth.

There will be eight film journals: Blue Valentine; Monsieur Verdoux; Chi-rak; Shortcuts; The Age of Innocence; L’Atalante; Journey to Italy; Jules and Jim.

Bibliography:
Plato’s Symposium (on line)
Freud Psychology of Love (Penguin, 2006, or texts available via PEP Web).
Selections from Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason (online).
Aristophanes Lysistrata and Assembly of Women (on line).
Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country (on line).
Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love (online).
Samuel Beckett, “First Love” (on line) and Play.
Raymond Carver, Collected Stories (Library of America)
Erica Jong, Fear of Flying.

Requirements: eight film journals (2 pages each, due before the assigned film is discussed) and one final paper (8 pages).

Please see English Department for description.

Students are provided a general introduction to a country's history, politics, environment, and performance through a range of resources: scholarly literature, film, music, and online resources; with particular focus on sites, communities, and events included in the 12 day intensive travel to that country (either Fall semester Intro with winter break travel; or spring semester Intro with late spring intensive travel). Students are given guidelines for writing about and representing live performances and experiences of exhibits and heritage sites for journaling and are expected to produce a written/creative project at the end of the travel. The itinerary and specific course content will vary according to the travel site and focus of each class.

This course will provide a wide-ranging introduction to the literatures of South Asia from roughly 1500 to the present, as well as an exploration of their histories and impact on South Asian society today. How are literary movements and individual works - along with the attitudes towards religion, society, and culture associated with them - still influential in literature, film, and popular culture? How have writers across time and language engaged with questions of caste, gender, and identity? We will read from the rich archive of South Asian writing in translation - from languages that include Braj, Urdu, Bangla, and Tamil - to consider how these literatures depict their own society while continuing to resonate across time and space. Topics of dicussion will include the Bhakti poetries of personal devotion, the literature of Dalits - formerly referred to as the Untouchables - and the ways in which literature addresses contemporary political and social problems. Students will leave this course with a sense of the contours of the literatures of South Asia as well as ways of exploring the role of these literatures in the larger world. No prior knowledge of South Asia is required; this course fulfills the cross-cultural analysis requirement.