In order to examine how innovations in technology and technique parallel editing, the close shot, framing devices, mobile cameras, etc. allow for increasingly longer and more complex narrative forms, students will be required to learn and employ close reading skills. We will, however, view these aesthetic changes in terms that acknowledge film s cultural function. This course will explore conflicting ideas and ideals of love and marriage through their history and representation in the West. The course reader includes selections from Plato, Ovid, the Bible, medieval romance, Milton, and Freud. Contemporary criticism focusing on culture and gender will accompany our reading of the novels of Charlotte Bront , Zora Neale Hurston, Marguerite Duras, and Maxine Hong Kinston.
Requirements are active participation in class and three five-page papers.
The course examines portrayals of supernatural beings in pre-modern and modern fiction as well as in Hollywood, Chinese and Hong Kong cinema. Maps, Geography and Literature Fiction and geography have long been partners, from Odysseus s adventures at sea, to Sethe s journey into Ohio in Toni Morrison s Beloved . Geographical descriptions and references to places both imaginary and real give fictional narrative a sense of place, a spatial frame in which events can unfold. Actual images of maps in novels, as in Treasure Island or The Lord of the Rings , can intensify the sense of adventure, but cartography can also multiply the levels of meaning in a novel when used metaphorically and metatextually. As we know from Heart of Darkness , spare traces on an otherwise blank expanse can acquire profound political, emotional and gender-specific meanings when used in very particular historical contexts.