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2007-08 Course Descriptions
Summer Session
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COLT 208 |
Comparative World Film: Love, Intimacy, and Melodrama in World Film |
4 credits |
Jeong Chang
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This course will focus on films from around the world that illuminate various academic discussions of love, intimacy, and melodrama. In particular, we will examine how globalization, the revolution in information technology, and the digital age have contributed to formal and thematic changes in the representation of love and intimacy in films. It is important to note that we will not be focusing solely on conceptions of romantic love, but also ideas of familial love, platonic love, and the rules that govern such relationships and its representations. At the same time, these films also contribute to discussions of the state of love and intimacy through the use of melodrama, genres such as the romantic comedy, and the role of love and intimacy in motivating film narrative. Therefore, the goal of the course will be to analyze films from around the world to better understand what we mean by love and intimacy, and how film helps us understand and question what we mean when we say, “I love you.” [Summer]
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COLT 350 |
Comparative Literature: Carnival in Literature and Cinema |
4 credits |
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In his book Rabelais and his World, Mikhail Bakhtin coins the term “Carnivalesque” for a literary piece that is influenced by the traditions of the carnival. In the course we will explore how a form of “serious” middle class, abstract entertainment, such as literature, incorporates a low class, sensual, and at times transgressive, cultural phenomenon as the carnival. We will also explore how the representation of carnival changes once cinema enters the scene, and we will study the place of grotesque bodily images in the carnivalesque. Course assignment will be a combination of academic assignments and creative assignments which will culminate with students writing a carnivalesque piece for the final project. Earlier creative writing experience is not a prerequisite and the course will include writing workshops. We will read and watch pieces by Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Fellini, Woody Allen and others. [Summer] |
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COLT 399 |
Special Studies: Shopping |
4 credits |
Max Rayneard
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“They were slaughtering each other in the fight for bargains”
– Émile Zola, The Lady’s Delight
From the rise of the department store in the 19 th Century to the ascendancy of the brand name in the 20 th, the middle class has to some measure been defined by its purchasing power and the manner of its exercise. Indeed, as the ubiquity of advertising should suggest to us, the impulse to shop in many ways defines contemporary experience. In this course, we shall seek to critically engage the idea of shopping and its many manifestations in historical and contemporary cultural products. We will historicize the act of shopping with regard to literary texts as diverse as Émile Zola’s account of a Parisian department store to Brett Easton Ellis’ shocking indictment of Reaganomic object fetishism in American Psycho. We will undertake a broad survey of critical and theoretical approaches to consumer culture, from Marxist criticism to psychoanalytic approaches. We will interrogate various examples of contemporary advertising in light of these critical texts. Finally, we will explore various works that seek to resist the prevailing trend in consumerism, including Reverend Billy’s recent film, What Would Jesus Buy? to excerpts from Naomi Klein’s polemical text No Logo. [Summer] |
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