COMMRC 3326 Seminar in Media Studies: Media Ecology

Brent Malin, 1414 Cathedral of Learning, Tuesdays 6:00pm to 8:30pm

Early twenty-first century celebrations and denunciations of so-called “new media” too often ignore the variety of ways in which “old media” were once themselves new. Indeed, much of the scholarly and popular arguments about digital technology—to take the most recent new media moment—sound suspiciously like arguments made about the radio and the telegraph before it, as well as about the transition from oral to written culture. This course will interrogate these arguments by looking at the longer history of new media encompassed in the tradition of “Media Ecology.” Heavily influenced by the work of Marshall McLuhan—who drew upon the earlier work of Lewis Mumford and Harold Innis—Media Ecology places the technological medium of communication at the center of its scholarly inquiry.  The theorists read and discussed in this course both support and challenge this tradition of thought, exploring a range of ways in which communication technologies interact with, shape, and are shaped by cultural processes.  Readings will be drawn from the work of such writers as Mumford, McLuhan, Innis, Friedrich Kittler, Vilém Flusser, Carolyn Marvin, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Wendy Chun, Armond Townes, and John Durham Peters.

ENGFLM 2452 Film History/Theory 2 

Neepa Majumdar, TBD, Tuesdays, 1:00 PM to 4:50 PM 

This seminar will focus on the history and theory of cinema from 1960 to the present.  While we will discuss individual theorists and historians, we will pay special attention to historical and theoretical debates within film studies. We will explore these debates through major film journals, theorists, filmmakers, and film movements. The focus will be three-fold: (1) formal analysis of film texts in their historical context; (2) the technological and sociocultural history of cinema; and (3) philosophical questions pertaining to cinema and its relation to technology, ideology, perception, and gender, sexual, and racial identities and practices. Each week’s readings will be designed to stimulate discussion in more than one of these three areas.  One of the goals of the course is to catch up on the major theoretical interventions of the past two decades and to this end, we will spend the last quarter of the semester with books and articles that students will choose from a list of award-winning or otherwise influential recent work.  

RUSS 2710 Cult and Cult Cinema 

Nancy Condee, 1219 Cathedral of Learning, Thursdays, 2:30 PM to 5:25 PM 

While “cult” is usually a term of religious opprobrium, “cult cinema” suggests the opposite: exaggerated enthusiasm for films that may—despite initial failure—gain long-lasting recognition.  What defines the cult film?  Its passionate audience? Its thematic transgression? Its exclusion from mainstream distribution (through censorship or ridicule)? Its circulation as a set of citations? Its exhibition practices? Its inscrutability? Its responsiveness to a social context? With screenings of US, British, Iranian, Russian, Armenian-Georgian, and French films, we will examine several theories of cult texts, with underlying curiosity about what the category could mean beyond cinema (in relation to painting, statuary, literature, and other cultural artifacts).