ENGLIT 2125 Game Studies
Zach Horton, G28 Cathedral of Learning, Wednesdays 6:00pm to 8:50pm
This interdisciplinary seminar will explore the key relationships between play, social and technological mediation, narrative, and visual culture. It will provide a wide-ranging survey of game studies, from foundational texts in play studies through the central debates in video game studies to the most recent scholarship on gamification, tabletop gaming, identity, and scale in the rapidly expanding field of game studies. Topics covered will include the history of gaming and ritual, play and childhood, emergent and environmental narrative, gamification and capital, game theory, artificial intelligence, video games, tabletop games, gaming and scale, gaming and gender, games and empire, agency, gaming and environment, cooperative gaming, and game design as an artistic medium. We will explore why games are not only a key form of cognitive mapping in digital control societies, but also significant sites of creative expression, and perhaps most significantly, a vital paradigm to critically engage agency, identity, and decision making in the twenty-first century. The underlying argument will be that we cannot understand how power, capital, or media more generally function today without a critical theory of play and games. It is no accident that capitalism has gamified itself, nor that games have become the dominant form of narrative media on a global scale.
Students from all disciplines are welcome. Final projects can be analytical (a paper or other form of media) or creative (a game or interactive fiction). Regardless of whether your goal is to engage games as cultural objects within your scholarship, to work creatively within a modality of play, or to broaden your critical methodology, my intent is that as a group we will all think, play, and create together.
ENGGFLM 2451/FMST 2151 Film History/Theory 1
Mark Lynn Anderson, 407 Cathedral of Learning, Tuesdays 1:00pm to 4:50pm
This seminar considers the critical terrain of the moving image for the period 1890 to 1950 as it informs the discipline of film and media studies today. While contemporary work on both the histories of international cinema and the elusive nature of film and screen practices remains deeply indebted to classical film theory, researchers have also sought to rethink the standard historical construction of the cinema through recontextualization, historiographical critique, and genealogical investigation. Part introduction to an established film theory canon (Hugo Münsterberg, Germaine Dulac, Sergei Eisenstein, Béla Balázs, Rudolf Arnheim, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and André Bazin) and part survey of early film history, this seminar aspires to demonstrate the continuing richness and relevance of a cinema of modernity for media studies by reading some of today’s most important voices on moving-image culture and history.
ENGFLM 2425 Black Time: Afrofuturism, Afropessimism and Beyond
Elizabeth Reich, 407 Cathedral of Learning, Wednesdays, 1:00pm to 4:50pm
This course will consider the interconnections between black theory, black political practice, and black art through a focus on cinematic time. It is no coincidence that the questions dominating Black Studies now – of how to think about Afrofuturism and Afropessimism; and how to reconcile the two – continue to find their best expression in recent works of film analysis…because these are inherently problems of time and film (and music) are among the rare, inherently time-driven media.
Recent film studies texts – Frank Wilderson’s Red, White and Black; Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake; Jared Sexton’s Masculinity and Men; sections of Reynaldo Anderson’s Afrofuturism 2.0; and Kara Keeling’s essay, “In the Interval” and Queer Times, Black Futures invite us to consider how the language and movement of film are essential to any exploration or theorization of the texture and, specifically, temporality of black living. Such exploration and theorization are no small matters, given the increasing visibility of black death in our society; the circulation of moving images of violence against black people; and the efforts to mobilize artistic and political practices asserting black life and possibility. In fact, though the project here may seem academic, it is also one where the rubber hits the road and – this course argues – the promise of Afrofuturism and the insistence of Afropessimism are already embedded in any contemporary black political projects. Questions of indexicality, the archive, surveillance, and the posthuman and queer also intersect with the work of studying Black time-based media and will be part of our coursework.