298. Experimental Course
Environmental Writing
A mixed literature/creative writing course, offers an overview of the genre of U.S. nature writing while providing a historical backdrop of shifting U.S. ideas about nature. The course examines the key characteristics of U.S. Nature Writing (namely the relationship between the individual, society, and the landscape expressed in each work). We will examine the narrative function of landscape description, the gendering of landscape in the texts, and the relationship between scientific description and literary strategy. What is the relationship between literary interpretations of the landscape and the ethical approaches to the nonhuman landscape? We will discuss whether it is possible to offer an objective description of the natural landscape, and discuss whether there is a natural non-human environment that can be separated from the human world.
Texts included: Henry David Thoreau's Walden, Mary Austin's Land of Little Rain, John Muir's My First Summer in the Sierras, excerpts from Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, Terry Tempest Williams' Refuge, Barry Lopez's Artic Dreams, and The Colors of Nature (nature writing essays by writers such Jamaica Kincaid, bell hooks, and Jeanne Watasuki Houston). (Michael Drout)
History of Early Cinema, 1895-1933
The course will examine the development of early cinematic technologies in the late 19th century up through their maturation into narrative films in the 1910s and 1920s. Focusing primarily on silent films from the U.S., England, France, Germany and Russia, the course will introduce students to a wide range of issues including the shift in aesthetics, visual grammar, and narrative structure guiding the transition from a 'cinema of attractions' to the silent 'feature film'. In addition to addressing aesthetic and narrative dimensions of early cinema, the course will introduce students to the work of film-makers such as D.W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille, Buster Keaton, Oscar Micheaux, Charlie Chaplin, F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, Rene Clair, Sergei Eisenstein, and others.
It will also examine important moments in early US film exhibition such as the Nickelodeon and the arrival of the movie palace, as well as the nascent commercial dimensions of the emerging international film trade. (Josh Stenger)