Courses
HACU
126 Introduction to Visual Culture (co-taught
with Sura Levine)
This course forms a multidisciplinary introduction to
the study of visual culture and various critical methods for reading
visual representations across different media, from fine art, photography,
cinema to advertising, illustration, performance, museum display and
exhibitions and others. By focusing on how vision becomes a privileged
sensory experience and cultural expression of meaning making in the
modern and postmodern eras and focusing on the explosion in the visual
arts in the 20th century, students will be introduced to such diverse
topics as: spectatorship and subjectivity, the archive as site of cultural
and visual memory, self-representation and self-fashioning, the influence
of mechanical and digital technologies of reproduction on image making,
world views, and spatial perception, representations of gender and race
in visual media, and the politics of museum display.
HACU 160 Place, Culture and the Imagination
How do we locate our identities in relation to specific
places? What role does place play in the writerly and readerly imagination?
Do men and women experience, relate to and create spaces differently?
How are landscapes marked by complicated histories? These are some of
the central questions that we will address in this interdisciplinary
literature course that seeks to explore symbolic representations of
place and home, including domestic and public spaces, rural and urban
areas, landscapes and politically contested geographies. Our primary
focus will be on literature (and some film) and the ways in which these
fictional landscapes become multilayered markers of psychological, national
and cultural identities. We will also read selected essays in cultural
geography, cultural studies of place, literary and film theory, and
postcolonial studies of mapping and cartography in order to sharpen
our skills in thinking symbolically and critically about place as an
important topos in fictional representations and as a shaper of cultural
identities. Topics include the modern and postmodern metropolis, the
house as gendered space of imagination and desire, the wilderness quest,
settler and indigenous visions of landscape in New Zealand and Australia,
and coming-of-age in the colonized spaces of the Caribbean.
HACU 180 Introduction to Cultural Studies
This course presents a critical introduction to the
theory and practice of
cultural studies, an interdisciplinary fields of inquiry which analyzes
the complex intersections between culture, identity, media, art and
economy. Focusing on culture as "signifying practices"--the
way we make meaning of everyday life--we examine the ways in which various
cultural texts (popular fiction, television, advertising, performance
art, film, photography) are produced, circulated and received within
and across cultures. After an introduction to critical studies of culture
and representation, we examine three case studies: tourism, travel literature
and postcolonialism; fashion and identity; and the cultural meanings
of film noir and neo-noir as popular genre.
HACU
197 Cross-Cultural Readings of the Short Story
This introductory comparative course treats the international
modern and contemporary short story as a distinctive literary genre.
Beginning with influential 19th-century examples of the American and
European short story, represented by Poe, Chekhov, Maupassant and others,
we devote most of the course to a discussion of the different forms,
techniques and themes of contemporary fiction in world literature, from
Africa, Asia, contemporary ethnic America, Latin America and Europe.
HACU 223 Film and Literature: Narrative, Culture, Identity
In this course we examine the intersections between psychological
and national identities, politics and history in cinematic and literary
representations from post-World War II Germany, Czechoslovakia, ireland,
Australia, the Caribbean, Argentina, China and Vietnam. In addition
to this thematic focus, we analyze the aesthetic and formal relationship
between literature, sepcifically the novel, and film as distinctive
but related art forms, issues of adaptation and translation, narrative
structure, cinematic language and literary style.
HACU 234 Traveling Identities: Immigrants,
Exiles and Sojourners in Film, Literature and Culture (course page)
This seminar focuses on the experience of immigrants,
exiles and sojourners, which have inspired
a number of contemporary novels, feature films, documentaries, autobiographies
and theoretical debates about cultural identity and location. Using
cultural studies of travel and displacement, ethnic studies, and psychoanalytic
theories of identity as critical frameworks for discussion, the course
examines some of the following issues arising from cinematic, fictional
and theoretical texts on migration and exile: the complexities of adaptation
or resistance to new cultures; culture transfer, hybridity and biculturality;
the journey as metaphor, escape, physical ordeal and psychological odyssey;
the meanings of nostalgia and home; intergenerational conflicts between
tradition and modernity; protagonists' and artists' representation and
negotiations of national and ethnic identities; the cultural consequences
of border crossings.
HACU 269 Gendered Identities in Music and Narrative (co-taught
with Jay Pillay)
This course centers on how gender is articulated and
crafted through music and narratives. Our approach will be intertextual
and interdisciplinary,
drawing on a number of fields including ethnomusicology, literary and
film studies, anthropology, women's studies, ethnic studies, queer theory
and dance studies. We will examine the ways in which male and female
identities and sexualities are culturally negotiated and contested in
case studies from various parts of the globe, including the Caribbean,
African American and Native American cultures, South Asia and its diaspora,
South Africa, and Euroamerican popular culture.
HACU 279 Twentieth-Century Cultures of American and European Modernism
Focusing on the rise and development of literary
and artistic modernism in American and European cultures, this comparative
course explores how modernism signaled both the emergence
of new aesthetic experimentation and developed in relation to cataclysmic
historical changes in culture and society during the early part of the
20th century, including the rise of mass culture and cinema; industrialization,
urbanization and migration; new concepts of gender roles and sexuality;
the impact of World War I and the Russian Revolution; and the emergence
of psychoanalysis and new forms of subjectivity and consciousness. Comparing
American and European writers and their vision of modernity, we will
also pay attention to the ways in which we might expand and revise our
understanding of 'high modernism' by considering the representations
of class, gender, race and the influence of popular culture in 'canonical'
texts. In addition, we will focus on women writers and African American
modern artists who provided their own critical responses to the challenges
of 'making it new.'
HACU 315 Critical Theory Seminar: Psychoanalytic Theory and Criticism
Beginning with Sigmund Freud's theories of dreams,
unconscious fantasy, sexuality and gender, this advanced seminar considers
the foundations of Freudian thought and some of the important revisions
and challenges to classic psychoanalytic theory by Erik Erickson, Jacques
Lacan, Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, and contemporary feminist psychoanalytic
critics in the humanities. The seminar focuses on major topic areas
in psychoanalysis--dream language, the case history as narrative, hysteria,
narcissism, loss and mourning, transference, the mother-child relationship
and gender identity--and their significance for literary, film and cultural
analysis.
