Summer Sessions 2008

SESSION I: June 2nd - July 9th

STONY BROOK CAMPUS

CCS 301.01-G  Theorizing Cinema and Culture
This course provides an in-depth look at some of the influential theories in cinema and cultural studies of the 20th century.  We will view a selection of films produced from the early years of cinema history through the more contemporary days, and put them in dialogue with film and cultural theories.  Situating various films within structures of power among communities and individuals, we suggest ways of understanding the ideological formation of representation, spectatorship, gender, sexuality, race, and nation.  Through thinking, talking, reading, and writing about films, this course addresses how films are both products of artistic choices and heavily implicated in cultural and political phenomena.
Prerequisite: Two courses toward the major in cinema and cultural studies
LEC-TUTH  9:30AM - 12:55 PM HUMANITIES 2045   
T. HUNG

CCS 311.01-G  Documentary and Gender
Nonfiction films have been enlightening, entertaining, teaching, and challenging us since the first actualités of the Lumière brothers. Yet Gender studies and documentary studies have been separated by disciplinary as well as prejudicial boundaries. In this course, we will explore the history of this expressive form of cinema and culture: noting its most important technological and cinematic innovations in addition to the significance of aesthetic pleasure and complexity. In evaluating the cultural contexts for the films (why they were made and what they tell us about the social concerns of the period) and the theoretical questions they raise, we will be looking to the blurry line between fiction and nonfiction and the problematic assumption of unbiased presentation.
Prerequisite: One D.E.C. Category B course.
Prerequisite: CCS 201 or HUM 201 or 202 or THR 117
LEC - MW  1:30 PM - 4:55 PM JAVITS 101   
H. STAATS

CLS 215.01-I   Classical Mythology
This course will explore myth and tragedy from antiquity to contemporary articulations.  By examining the discourse espoused in ancient Greek tragedy, the relationship between gods and humans, heroes, heroines and society, we can better find meaning and comprehension of narratives and illustrations found in contemporary art.  The material in this course will include poetry, drama, film and novel.
Advisory Prerequisite: One course in literature
LEC - MW  9:30 AM - 12:55 PM     SBS  S328
K. THOMAS

CLT 220.01-J  Non-Western Literature: Modern Chinese Fictions in Translation
Since the late nineteenth century, a seemingly catastrophic series of political, social, and cultural events have shaped modern China as it has been.  These forces made fiction one of the most visible, voluminous, and influential forms of culture written in Chinese in the twentieth century, through careful study of selected literary works as well as background texts, including films, we will ask:  What is modern about this literature?  How is Chinese about it?  In order to address these questions effectively, we will got to specific topics such as representations of cross-cultural encounters with the West, imagination and geopolitics, cultural media and realities, individual freedom and public regulation.
Advisory Prerequisite:  Completion of D.E.C. category A

LEC-MW 1:30PM-4:55PM MELVILLE LBR E4315    
W. JIANG

HUM/PHI 109.01-B   Philosophy and Literature in Social Context
The role of literature and philosophy in understanding and critically assessing personal experience and social life.  The links among literary texts, philosophical issues, and political and social commitments are explored.  Topics include the relations between language and experience, the role of philosophical thanking through literary texts, and the significance of literary expression in different cultural and historical situations.
LEC - MW  1:30 PM - 4:55 PM      PHYSICS P118   
K. THOMAS              

HUM  123.01-B   Sexuality in Literature
An exploration of the expression and interpretation of sexual experience in literature and culture, through discussion of selections from world literature and art, both classic and contemporary.  Themes include temptation and gratification, desire and fulfillment, and how societies shape gender roles and deviance and set limits on sexual representation in literature and art.  Specifically, we will look at the theme of “fatal love.”  This course satisfies a DEC–B.
LEC - TUTH   5:30 PM - 8:55 PM    MELVILLE E4310     
A. CLAIRE BURROWS

HUM  201.01-D   Film and Television Studies: Genres
This course introduces some basic concepts of certain film genres such as slapstick comedy, martial arts and musical. We will be focusing on the importance of ‘body’ and ‘sound’ in these film genres and mode. Through screenings, the course will lead the students to understand some important concepts in film theory and criticism and how those concepts are related in some specific genre films.
Prerequisite:  Completion of D.E.C. category B
LEC - TUTH   1:30 PM - 4:55 PM MELVILLE LBR. N5004 
S. LEE

MANHATTAN CAMPUS

CCS 313.60-H   Television Studies
What is television today? It is no longer a site-specific medium. Its content is shared across interactive storage and delivery media as we watch “TV” on DVD, computer screens, the iPod and iPhone. The television itself ceases to be a “box” and is now an architectonic element on our walls in the form of plasma screens. “Programming” has changed as users distribute their own televisual content online at YouTube. This course examines changes to the ontology of television as it studies histories and theories of television in an era of technological and cultural convergence.
LEC – MW 1:30 PM – 4:55 PM  TBA    
R. GUINS

CLS  215.60-I   Classical Mythology
Many people think of myths are fairy tales from the past, with no or very little relevance to our contemporary world. The main objective of this course will be to prove that myth today is still an important way of understanding and interpreting reality around us. The course will examine the nature of myth by introducing the principal myths of Greek mythology, and it will also connect the Greek mythical archetypes to contemporary culture. We will look at several particular myths and see how they are incorporated into various productions of ancient culture as well as contemporary literature, film, and music.
Advisory Prerequisite: One course in literature
LEC - TUTH   9:30 AM - 12:55 PM     TBA
L. TOKE        

CLT  335.60-G  The Cult Film
The Cult Film is an ambiguous and elusive creature. When we use the term “cult film” are we referring to a type of film? A genre? Do certain characteristics make a film a “cult film”? If so, what are they? What is that “little bit extra” that cult promises? Are cult films the productions of well-known cult directors like Russ Meyer, John Carpenter, Ed Wood, Ted V. Mikels, Al Adamson, Jack Hill, Ray Dennis Steckler, and John Waters? Do films have to be “bad” to become cult? How do well-received “mainstream” Hollywood films (ex: Casablanca and Star Wars) become “culted”? Is cult limited to a film type, or a social process: something that happens to a film? Is the term “cult” even useful to describe such varied films? These, and more, are the types of questions that we will ask in our attempt to study the many conditions of the cult film. I say, “conditions”, because the cult film requires that we work to understand the various situations that lead to its construction and on-going mutations. Therefore, we will try and answer the question “what is the cult film” by examining various academic theories on the subject, its aesthetic forms, a few of its auteur directors, audience and taste, cult genres, and modes of exhibition. We conclude by examining our own present period and its cult offerings in the form of Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007, formerly part of Grindhouse). Grindhouse’s aspirations and failings offer us fascinating insights into the status, understandings, and challenges facing the cult film today in the era of multiplex exhibition, DVD, new generational tastes, and Hollywood blockbuster hegemony. Films screened include: Southland Tales. Repo Man, Flash Gordon, Mystery Science Theater 3000, The Van, Pink Flamingos, Up!, Escape from New York, Switchblade Sisters, Black Mama, White Mama, Vanishing Point, and Death Proof.    
Prerequisite: U3 or U4 standing
Advisory Prerequisites: One course in literature: HUM 201 or 202 or THR 117
LEC - MW   9:30 AM - 12:55 PM    TBA      
R. GUINS

HUM 220.60-G   Cross-Cultural Encounters – The Cold War
The course will look at different manifestations of the Ideological State Apparatus (Althusserl) such as television, advertisement, cinema, and literature during the height of the Cold War in the United Sates and the Soviet Union in order to answer the following questions: How is national paranoia generated? How is political ideology internalized by individual subjects? How is fear created? Why is it that a sense of apocalyptic threat and conspiracy proved to be much stronger in the American cultural imagination than in its Soviet counterpart? The answer to these questions lies in the often-underestimated power of popular culture. Fiction and fantasy, as it will be argued, play crucial part in the different processes of ideological interpellation.
Prerequisite: Completion of DEC Category B
LEC – TUTH 1:30 PM – 4:55 PM  TBA
L. TOKE

SESSION II: JULY 14th - AUGUST 21th

STONY BROOK CAMPUS

CCS 101.01-B  Images and Texts: Understanding Culture
This course examines the images and texts of film, television, art, advertising, and photography, and how they come to characterize and shape our experience of everyday lives.  Using case studies, students learn how to recognize, read and analyze culture within particular cultural, political, or historical contexts, touching upon such important issues as gender, class, ideology, race, censorship, and globalization.  Since this is the first course in our Cinema and Cultural Studies major, primary emphasis will be placed on film.  This course satisfied DEC category B.
LEC - TUTH   1:30 PM - 4:55 PM  JAVITS 103  
L. MA

CLS 215.02-I  Classical Mythology
This course is an introduction to ancient Greek religion, literature, and art.  Special emphasis will be given to the presentation of myth in Classical Greek literature as well as to the influence of classical mythology on later literature, art, and philosophy. 
Advisory Prerequisite: One course in literature
LEC - TUTH   9:30 AM - 12:55 PM        PHYSICS P118
J. JACOBO

CLT 235.01-K  American Pluralism Film and Literature
Generally speaking, “pluralism” refers to the idea, whether employed in a political, social, or philosophical context, that diversity is a boon to communities and should be acknowledged.  Accordingly, the title of this course, American Pluralism in Film and Literature, suggests that we will investigate a range of experiences and subject positions as they are represented and presented in both mediums.  In the interest of our much-condensed summer course, however, we will set the parameters of our investigation within African American film and literature.  As we view what can only be the smallest sampling of African American film and literature, we will address such topics as the aesthetics of Black film and literature, racial construction, the use and function of stereotypes, and the exploration of social problems as an impetus for artistic production.  This course satisfies DEC-K.   
Advisory Prerequisites: Completion of D.E.C. categories I and J
LEC - MW 9:30 AM - 12:55    HUMANITIES 3018
A. FOLEY

CLT  335.01-G  Re-envisioning the Child in Postwar Cinema
A consistent theme in postwar cinema, children have served as the cinematic embodiment of realism and transculturality. From Roberto Rossellini's Germania anno zero (Germany Year Zero) and Gianni Amelio's Le Chiavi di casa (The Keys to the House) to Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay and Todd Field's Little Children, the cinematic narrative as nation politicizes children and childhoods, complicating a clear national identity. Beginning with Italian neorealism, when cinema was still thought of largely in terms of discrete national cultures and the relatively limited influences of one country's national cinema upon that of another, we will explore the notion of "national cinema" while noting how the subject of childhood plays into one of the presumptions of the national cinema approach: that while films make an interesting object of study in themselves, their ultimate utility lies in ways they produce a collective narrative of a people and national culture.
Prerequisite: U3 or U4 standing
Advisory Prerequisites: One course in literature: HUM 201 or 202 or THR 117
LEC - TUTH   9:30 AM - 12:55 PM   JAVITS 103
H. STAATS

HUM  202.01-D  Film and Television: History and Theory
This course introduces some basic concepts of film theory and history such as formalism, realism, auteur theory, classical Hollywood cinema and other traditions while especially focusing on acoustic element in films.  Students will understand the function and history of sound in films throughout the class.  Through screenings, the course will lead the students to understand some important concepts such as diegesis, narration, and exhibition practices and how they are related in some specific films.
Prerequisite: Completion of D.E.C. category B
LEC - MW  1:30 PM - 4:55 PM  MELVILLE LBR. N5004
S. LEE

MANHATTAN CAMPUS

CCS 311.60-G  Gender and Genre in Film
Typically, the term “melodrama” brings to mind films with over-the-top narratives in which the suffering of a “passive innocent” leads to enlightenment and which are produced for a primarily female audience. Meanwhile, horror has often been associated with the pleasure of the male spectator. In this course, we will consider melodrama as a form of artistic expression wherein, as Peter Brooks has noted, tension exists between the individual protagonist’s point of view and that of his/her society; and, it is this “troubling individuality that threatens to unravel the social fabric” which forms the center of the conflicts upon which melodramas hinge. This definition could, as we shall see, also be readily applied to much modern horror. Using Linda Williams’ essay, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess” as a foundation, we will look at how elements of these two film genres that rely heavily upon excess and strive to elicit extreme bodily responses from the spectator have been combined and deployed in the construction of both domestically and internationally-produced modern horror films. More specifically, we will investigate how gender is employed in these films and to what end –an activity that necessitates an understanding of the political and historical climates in which the films were produced, as well as the social commentaries/ fears and ideologies that permeate them. Finally, we will examine if, how, and why these films participate in the racialization of gender and sexuality and/or subvert this tendency.
Prerequisite: CCS 201 or HUM 201 or 202 or THR 117
LEC - MW   9:30 AM - 12:55 PM    TBA
D. ALTGILBERS

CLS  215.61-I   Classical Mythology
The objectives of this course are twofold.  The first is to introduce the gods and heroes of ancient Greece, especially as they are represented in literary works.  We will also examine how Greek mythology informs contemporary culture on all levels and shapes our understanding of the world.  To achieve this, the course is designed to introduce important myth patterns, and then encourage students to apply those paradigms to contemporary life, be it in TV, film, politics, social structures, etc.  This course fulfills the DEC “I” requirement.
Advisory Prerequisite: One course in literature.
LEC - TUTH   9:30 AM - 12:55 PM   TBA
M. SANNING

HUM 121.60-B   Death and Afterlife in Literature:  Dulce et Decorum Est Mori
How we deal with death is directly related to how we deal with life.  This course will exam representations of death and the afterlife from antiquity to the twenty-first century and the various meanings we ascribe them.  Specifically, we will examine points of intersection between death and concepts such as history, exile, religion and superstition, sexuality, gender, the family, madness, politics and technology.  Many other meanings are possible; students are encouraged to raise alternative ways of thinking about the topic.   Simply put, this course aims to answer the question, “What does it mean to be alive?” by examining our constructions of death. 
LEC - TUTH   1:30 PM - 4:55 PM  TBA
M. SANNING