Fall 2012
Theatre Research and Bibliography (Professor Judith Milhous): This course will provide an overview of the profession and how one begins to join the conversation it represents. Classes will concern such matters as general research methodologies as demonstrated in current publications; approaches to historiography; the procedure for getting papers accepted for conferences and the benefits of participating therein; and a number of issues related to teaching. A constant theme will be the preparation and writing of research papers, conference papers, and papers for publication. Examples and strategies will be drawn from scholarship on a broad a range of geographical and historical material. Factors that affect grades include: demonstration that the assigned readings have been done, via informed participation in class discussion and on an in-class exam, written on the scheduled exam date; weekly written exercises; and several class presentations, most of them connected to a final term paper. A basic text will be Wayne C. Booth, et al., The Craft of Research, third edition, which you may already know, but which we can all benefit from re-reading.
Thursdays, 2:00 pm to 4:00pm.
Contextual and Intertextual Studies in Drama (Professor Marvin Carlson): In this course we will study selected dramatic texts from world drama, representing a wide range of traditions and forms, from ancient times to the present. Three or more plays, depending on length, will be analyzed each week, along with ancillary theoretical and historical materials. Contextual considerations will include the historical and cultural surroundings of individual works and how the works reflect, reflect upon, or interact with these, while intertextual considerations will include the expectations of genre, the reworkings of narratives and characters, parodies and satires, and the dynamics of experimentation.
Assignments include two short papers and a final examination.
Mondays, 2:00pm to 4:00pm
Studies in Theatre: Theatre and Pedagogy (Professor James Wilson): This course will explore the intersections of theatre and pedagogy through theatre history, performance theory, dramatic literature, and practical classroom methodologies. While the seminar will provide students with opportunities to focus on their own approaches to teaching and theatre course curricula, class discussions will primarily examine foundational and current theatre scholarship, plays from diverse historical eras and geographies, and social and political critiques. Some of the questions we will consider include: How are elements of didactic drama and competing pedagogies evident in historical performance traditions and community-based theatres (such as liturgical drama of the Middle Ages, the auto sacramental, Noh theatre, Romantic closet drama, Federal Theatre Project youth and puppet plays, anti-lynching plays, and theatre for people with disabilities)? What aesthetic and community-building strategies do artists and activists employ to facilitate social change in the ongoing struggle for racial equality, sexual liberation, workers' rights, and international pacifism? How do theatre educators at the college level engage similar approaches while negotiating the curricular demands and possible political pitfalls of selecting, teaching, and directing theatre texts? Some of the writers we will read are Georgia Douglas Johnson, Bertolt Brecht, John Dewey, Hallie Flanagan, Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal, Eugenio Barba, Pierre Bourdieu, Jill Dolan, Guillermo Gomez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes, Baz Kershaw, and Helen Nicholson. Written assignments will include two short response papers (one of which will be a relevant book or performance review suitable for publication); a revised theatre course syllabus; notes for a short presentation focused on teaching or directing at the college level; and a 15-20 page original research paper focused on theatre and pedagogy (broadly defined).
Tuesdays, 4:15pm to 6:15pm
Special Topics in Theatre: Theatre and Popular Entertainment: Animals and Performance (Professor Maurya Wickstrom): This class is a response to the increasingly important field of Animal Studies and an exploration of the non-human animal in performance. We will look at ways in which the field is developing and what its central concerns are thus far. Students will also have the opportunity to study specific historic and contemporary instances of the non-human animal in performance. The class will be guided in part by questions like the following: In what ways are performance and theatre specifically equipped for meditations on non-human animals, interventions on their behalf, or confrontations with them? What happens between human and non-human animals on stage? What does that meeting yield or prompt, theoretically, philosophically or artistically? What sorts of theory, philosophy, and practice have provoked theatre and performance artists and theorists into engagements with non-human animals? Is there a historiography to be constructed regarding the theatre's relationship to animals? Fundamental philosophical texts under consideration include Derrida's The Animal That Therefore I Am, Agamben's The Open: Man and Animal, and Deleuze and Guattari's "On Becoming Animal." Other theorists from outside the field of theatre and performance may include Bruno Latour, J.M. Coetzee, and John Berger. We'll also briefly survey important ideas on non-human animals historically. Other readings will include plays or documents of animal performance across a historical and geographical spectrum, and essays by theatre and performance scholars and scholars from other fields. We will also include the work of a few artists who have created singular ideas about animals. If the season gives us an opportunity, it would be ideal to attend a play or other performance event together. Course Requirements: The following requirements are interlinked:
a. A class presentation on each student's emerging area of interest in the field.
b. A 6-8 page paper which is the initial work on the final course paper and which may be linked to the course presentation.
c. Final paper, 18-20 pages.
Tuesdays, 2:00pm to 4:00pm
Studies in Theatre Aesthetics: Theatre and Theatricality in the Renaissance (Professor James Saslow): "All the world's a stage" wrote Shakespeare, and all the arts of the early modern era were profoundly imbued with metaphors, images, and techniques of the theatre. This lecture course will examine the interrelations between the performing and visual arts from ca. 1300-1750, when dramatic performance and the buildings to house it developed the forms we know today. In tandem with literature and architecture, painting, sculpture, and graphic art explored theatricality through naturalistic narratives that aimed to involve the viewer as if they were dramas, with the picture frame assuming the same role as the proscenium. From sacred drama performed in or around churches like Giotto's Arena Chapel, through the court masques and operas of the Baroque, to the emerging commercial popular theatre of Hogarth's London, this course ranges in scope from literal to metaphorical: from theatre "proper" (spaces dedicated to performance) to the ephemeral art of festival and pageant, to architecture and decoration that aimed to theatricalize other activities, and to theatricality as subject matter and metaphor in the visual arts. In addition to providing a chronological overview, the course will emphasize several broad interdisciplinary themes: secularization, patronage, political uses of theatrical self-display, and theatre as material culture (the intersection of art and technology). While designed to meet the needs of students in Theatre, Art History, and Renaissance Studies, the course will also cut across these fields: for however academia may categorize them today, in Renaissance culture the art of theatre and the theatricality of art were inextricable.
The course will include a final examination as well as a final research project.
Wednesdays, 2:00pm to 4:00pm
Seminar in Film Studies: Film History I (Professor Anupama Kapse): This class will survey the "birth" of cinema from a number of inter-related perspectives. How did the heightened realism and new storytelling impulse of the cinema alter existing modes of pictorial and theatrical display? We will begin with early experiments with moving images and think about actualities, serials and comic shorts as-the new genres of early cinema, which then gave way to an industrial mode of production driven by a powerful star-system and large studios. The course will not only study cinema's birth and development but also its ability to invent novel film genres, change perceptions of modernity, mobilize race-gender politics (sometimes dubiously), picture new women, and radically enhance viewing pleasures. We will situate these topics within the larger context of international film movements, the development of national cinemas worldwide, and broader questions of film historiography. Although our primary examples will be drawn from American silent cinema, we will also turn to British, Indian, Russian, Swedish and German examples to better understand the rapid proliferation and varied applications of the medium. Finally, we will examine the initial impact of sound on cinema though, as we will see, silent cinema had always been an aural medium. Requirements: Readings must be completed before the day for which they are slotted. Please come to class on time. Full attendance, engaged viewing, and active classroom participation are vital to your success. Discussion--20%. Reading responses and discussion questions-10 %. A research paper with original content (20-25 pages) will fulfill a major requirement for this course—70%. Your topic must be chosen in consultation with me. A one page proposal will be due four weeks before the final paper is due, after which we will meet to discuss your topic. More than one absence will make it very hard for you to pass the course. Please let me know at least a day in advance if you are going to miss class. A list of screenings and readings is available in the Certificate Programs Office (Room 5110).
Thursdays, 11:45am to 3:45pm
Seminar in Film Studies: Orson Welles: Auteur, Star, Sellout (Professor Marc Dolan): Is it possible to be both an avant-garde icon and an unabashed sellout? If anyone achieved both those distinctions during the twentieth century, it was Orson Welles. As actor, writer, director, and producer in theatre, radio, film, and television, Welles moved frequently during the mid-twentieth century from self-financing bleak black-and-white arthouse films to camping it up in drag on candycolored tv variety shows. Art and commerce were inextricably intertwined in his work, as were the aesthetic concerns of both the US and Europe in the age of mass-market auteurism. Although our central focus is on Welles specifically, the course should also be of interest to students interested more generally in the history of stardom, auteurism, and the American media industry. Rather than reducing Welles to the stereotypical artist undone by overcommerciailized media, this course will attempt to appreciate the totality of his work, how each part of it affected the others just as the US and Europe, massmarket and avant garde, all affected each other in the mid-twentieth century. Topics covered may include: the Mercury Theatre and The Mercury Theatre of the Air; Citizen Kane; Welles's interest in Latin America (e.g., It's All True); Welles as actor for hire (e.g., Jane Eyre, The Long, Hot Summer, and A Man for All Seasons); Welles and transatlantic noir (The Stranger, The Third Man, The Lady from Shanghai); Touch of Evil (multiple versions); Welles as the anti-Olivierian Shakespearean (Macbeth, Othello, Chimes at Midnight); The Trial and the Kennedy-era artfilm; cinema and sleight of hand (Follow the Boys, F for Fake); why unfinished projects remain unfinished (The Fountain of Youth, Don Quixote, The Other Side of the Wind, and The Brass Ring); Welles as narrator (The Vikings, Start the Revolution without Me, Moonlighting) and Welles's ongoing performance of celebrity self (e,g.,The Jack Benny Show, I Love Lucy, the Paul Masson commercials, and his multiple appearances on The Tonight Show, Dinah!, and the Dean Martin Roasts). The course will be anchored in readings from Simon Callow's The Road to Xandau and Hello Americans, Joseph McBride's Whatever Happened to Orson Welles? and Francois Thomas and Jen-Piere Berthome's Orson Welles at Work, but week by week we will also be reading specific journal articles on the works under study. Readings may also be assigned from Lars Trodson's About Orson, John Shelley Rubin's The Making of Middlebrow Culture, and Michael Denning's The Cultural Front, among other works. Additional readings may include Timothy Corrigan's "Auteurs and the New Hollywood" and "The Commerce of Auteurism" and excerpts from Jon Lewis's Whom God Wishes to Destroy: Francis Coppola and the New Hollywood.{plain Before the first class students are advised to read chapters 1-14 of Callow's Road to Xanadu. Students are expected to complete weekly readings and screenings (when assigned), one-page weekly writing assignments, deliver a 15-20 minute presentation, and submit a 6,000-word final paper. Final papers may center on Welles or, with permission of the instructor, on issues of authorship and/or the "star auteur" (e.g. Coppola, Hitchcock, Tarantino, Gilliam, Bogdanovich, Cassavetes, Tarantino) that emerge organically from material discussed throughout the semester.
Fridays, 11:45am to 2:45pm
Seminar in Film Studies: Documenting the Self: Performance in Non-Fiction Film (Professor Edward Miller): This seminar examines the significance of performance in nonfiction film. The course begins by looking at depictions of the self in cinema vérité and direct cinema. Filmmakers such as D.A. Pennebaker, the Maysles Brothers, and Fred Wiseman eliminated the artifice of voice-over, interviews, archival footage, and incidental music—and made use of new lightweight equipment—in order to create a more lifelike documentary. They were especially drawn to capturing backstage views of rock stars (such as Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie) as well as gaining access to interactions of ordinary people in extraordinary situations (such as in mental institutions, on the road selling bibles, working in political campaigns).As this class looks at methods of filming both offstage and onstage performances, our readings come from cinema and performances studies, as well as relevant texts from visual culture and sociology. We read Amelia Jones and Rebecca Schneider on the role of the body in performance, Shelton Waldrep and Rosalind Krauss on the aesthetics of self-presentation, Joseph Roach, Richard Dyer, and Edgar Morin on charisma and celebrity as well as Bill Nichols, Stella Bruzzi, and Thomas Waugh on performance in documentary film. We trace a selective history of nonfiction film since 1960, beginning with the paradigm shift inspired by the assembling of distinctive Parisians in Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch's Chronicle of a Summer (1961). We counterpoise the strategies of directors who represent the "other" in films like the Maysles Brother's Grey Gardens (1975) and Shirley Jackson's Portrait of Jason (1967) with the tactics of mediatized self-portraiture utilized by artists like Martha Rosler, Joan Jonas, and Cindy Sherman. We pay particular attention to on-screen performances of gender and race due to the influence of identity politics on many of the key nonfiction works of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Marlon Rigg's Tongues Untied (1989), Isaac Julien's Looking for Langston (1989), and Jennie Livingston's Paris is Burning (1990). Finally we assess the ongoing impact of groundbreaking reality television like An American Family (1971) that features the flamboyant Lance Loud (1971) as well as the third season of The Real World (1993) that stars the AIDS activist Pedro Zamora. This course is designed to integrate the study of film and performance and encourages an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the emphasis upon self-expression in contemporary media culture. Class participation: Presentation of a reading as well as a conference-like talk in the final session. Paper Proposal: Due 8th week. Constructed like an abstract for a conference. Research paper: Due one week after the last session. At least 20 pages, this paper must be theoretically informed, involving a close reading of performance/performativity in a film, video, or another form of media (radio, blog/vlog, social media).
Mondays,4:15pm to 8:15pm
Seminar in Film Studies: Seminar in Film Theory (Professor Amy Herzog): This class will provide an overview of significant movements, debates, and figures in film theory. Readings will span both classical and contemporary film theory, addressing a range of approaches including realism, structuralism, auteur theory, genre criticism, psychoanalytic film theory, feminist and critical race theories, and third cinema. The class will examine writings on cinema in their historical and national contexts, looking at the ways in which film theory intersects with political, cultural, and aesthetic trends. The final sessions of the course will focus on recent developments in film theory, in particular the debates surrounding cognitive approaches to film, the evolution of digital technology, and the writings of philosopher Gilles Deleuze. In each case, new theoretical work on cinema will be read in relation to the complex history of film criticism. In addition, the class will examine the field of film theory alongside related fields of aesthetics and representation (e.g. art history and photography, television studies, cultural studies, visual studies, postmodernism), exploring the ways these disciplines have overlapped. Each seminar meeting will involve close analyses of readings related to a particular topic or theme. We will discuss the contexts within which these writings emerged, and the institutional frameworks that provided for the evolution of the field. Written texts will be read alongside specific cinematic examples. Screenings will be conducted in class. Ideally, students will also view supplemental films that ftlineare suggested, and attend screenings and discussions in venues around the city. Students will write either two ten-page analysis papers, performing close readings of theoretical texts, or one twenty-page research paper on a topic in film theory. Each student will also be responsible for a short, illustrated presentation, meant to facilitate our discussion of the readings for that class (these presentations were a highlight of the course this fall; the students approached them quite creatively). We will also post questions and responses to the readings on a course blog.
Wednesdays, 11:45am to 3:45pm