Sample Course Descriptions

This course examine writing through the lens of documentary film. As we read essays and watch non-fiction films, we will consider the question: How does the framing of an issue shape how the audience receives it? As we critically analyze the rhetorical choices made by auteurs (both writers and filmmakers), we will strengthen our own prose and deepen our understanding of multimodal composition.

In this course, we will scrutinize the interconnected networks and systems, both visible and invisible, that undergird our experience and understanding of the places and spaces around us. Excavating place as theme, we will read texts and watch films that ask us to consider how we create and are created by the environments we inhabit and encounter, whether physical locations or digital spaces. We will begin the semester by listening and responding to ongoing conversations about place, social infrastructure, nostalgia, memory, extinction, culture, language, and environmental justice, among other topics; by the end of the semester, we will move to reorient, interrupt, and perhaps even disrupt the discourse.

In this course, we will analyze the theme of dissent as expressed through American cultural production from the nineteenth century to the present. We will approach this subject from an interdisciplinary perspective, intersecting culture and politics, examining patterns of individual and collective dissent that have emerged through literature, journalism, art, film, and music. Over the course of the semester, we will examine both artists who have experienced government or corporate censure and texts that engage with themes of nonconformity and rebellion, whether against the state or the status quo. We will also explore subversive texts, allegories, and idiosyncratic expressions of dissent to show how artists responded to the constraints of their cultural context, not only politically but aesthetically. Rather than romanticizing the figure of the rebel, we will think critically about the possibilities and limitations of dissent as aesthetic and political practice.

In this course, we will consider the dialogical and dynamic interaction between literature and film as we analyze and closely read literary texts and their adaptations into film. We will explore the unique advantages and challenges of adapting various genres of writing including fiction, non-fiction, drama, and poetry to analyze how filmmakers reimagine a text in an entirely different medium. As we learn to closely read films, we will apply terminology from film theory and film production to our analysis of cinematography, editing, music, and other elements of film. Examining literary texts and films created by artists from around the world, we will explore how different cultures and societies provide unique contexts for composing and reframing stories. In our online discussions and writing projects including mise en scène analysis, we will interpret, analyze and develop our own perspectives on literature, film, and society while also engaging with and responding to pluralistic perspectives.