2014 Summer courses

Description: This course introduces students to the social, historical, and technological contexts of film, including its relationships to other mass media. The first part of the course will provide an introduction to basic film analysis. Movies from the first few decades of the twentieth century will allow us to explore the two basic functions of film—to record and to create—as well as the techniques and artistic and ideological concerns of early filmmakers. In the second part of the course, we will view representative films from a variety of overlapping genres, attending to ways in which generic conventions teach us to read and respond to films. Our discussions will aim not only to ask how particular genres teach us to look at films and the world, but also to think about the wider degree to which cinema and culture interact. How does the world shape film? Does cinema shape the world? How does the history of Hollywood and the studio system continue to influence the western film industry in the twenty-first century? How useful is to distinguish, following James Monaco, between movies, cinema, and film? How have the transition to digital and the advent of new media affected film production, promotion, and reception? By the end of the course, students will be equipped with the vocabulary and skills necessary to analyze films formally and thematically, and to situate them in their wider cultural contexts.

Evaluation: 

• 15% Active Participation
• 10% Quizzes
• 15% Scene Analysis
• 30% Paper
• 30% Final Exam

Texts: 

• Maria Pramaggiore and Tom Wallis, Film: A Critical Introduction, 3^rd ed.

Films: 

• Early Shorts (1894-5), dir. Lumière Bros. (5 mins)
• Le voyage dans la lune (1902), dir. Georges Méliès (14 mins)
• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), dir. Robert Wiene
• Battleship Potemkin (1925), dir. Sergei Eisenstein
• Metropolis (1927), dir. Fritz Lang
• Man with a Movie Camera (1929), dir. Dziga Vertov
• The Triumph of the Will (1935), dir. Leni Riefenstahl
• London Can Take It (1940), dirs. Harry Watt and Humphrey Jennings (9 mins)
• Citizen Kane (1941), dir. Orson Welles
• Double Indemnity (1944), dir. Billy Wilder
• The Third Man (1949), dir. Carol Reed
• Singin’ in the Rain (1952), dir. Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly
• Vertigo (1958), dir. Alfred Hitchcock
• La Jetée (1962), dir. Chris Marker (28 mins)
• Blade Runner (1982), dir. Ridley Scott
• Robocop (1988), dir. Paul Verhoeven
• Ironman (2008), dir. Jon Favreau
• The Decelerators (2012), dir. Mark Slutsky (5 mins)
• The Square (2013), dir. Jehane Noujaim
• Her (2013), dir. Spike Jonze

Format: Lectures, Screenings and Discussion

Average enrollment: 50

Description: This course is intended to provide students with an overview of some of the most important Canadian writers to emerge since WWII. The syllabus follows a chronological progression, but while we will explore the social and historical context in which poets and writers have evolved, we will also pay special attention to several important tensions or shifts in form and content that have developed in the last decades. Thus, poets and writers have often been paired to illuminate both similarities and differences in interest and aesthetics. Some tensions we will observe include nationalism and regionalism, modernist and postmodernist aesthetics, as well as biculturalism and multiculturalism. We will also explore notions of identity as we grapple with issues relating to First Nations and the immigrant experience.

Evaluation: 

• Attendance: 10%
• Reading Quizzes: 10%
• In-Class Essay: 25%
• Essay: 35%
• Final Exam: 30%

Texts: 

• Lecker, Robert, Ed. Open Country: Canadian Literature in English. Toronto: Nelson, 2007.
• Wilson, Ethel. Swamp Angel. Toronto: Nelson, 2008.
• Fennario, David. Balconville. Montreal: Talon Books, 1980.

Format: Lectures

Description: This course takes a transatlantic approach to the study of modern fiction. We will examine three English-language modern novels, two novellas, and three short stories by writers from Ireland, Britain, the United States, and Canada. This approach will help us understand the cosmopolitan character of modern fiction, the wide reach of modernist formal innovation, and a range of literary responses to the changes wrought by “modernity.” Our study of these works will map out their major formal, historical, and thematic concerns. We will tune our attention to the way in which they represent “modernity” and its challenges in the first decades of the twentieth century. Some of these challenges include: shifting understandings of psychology, subjectivity, and temporality; the fate of art and the artist in the modern world; the trauma of war; and the legacy of colonialism. While the class schedule indicates particular themes relevant to each novel, our discussions will focus on the way they are taken up by many of the novelists on the course to different ends. Our understanding of “modernity” and “modernism” will develop through close readings of the novels in conjunction with selected critical essays. These essays will help us understand modern fiction as actively engaged in its cultural moment; as Michael Levenson has, we too will recognize these as “forbidding work[s that] belonged to complicated, unforgiving times” and as evidence of the modernist aspiration “to place art and its imaginative demands at the center of an effort to build a more humane future.”  

Evaluation: 

• Discussion Question 5%
• Participation 10%
• Essay 1 20%
• Essay 2 35%
• Final Exam 30%

Texts: 

• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
• James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
• William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
• Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
• Course Pack (stories by Katherine Mansfield, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald)

Format: Lectures and Discussion

Average Enrollment:  50