This course surveys the history of world film from cinema s precursors to 1945. We will develop methods for analyzing film while examining the growth of film as an art, an industry, a technology, and a political instrument. Topics include the emergence of film technology and early film audiences, the rise of narrative film and birth of Hollywood, national film industries and movements, African-American independent film, the emergence of the genre film (the western, film noir, and romantic comedies), ethnographic and documentary film, animated films, censorship, the MPPDA and Hays Code, and the introduction of sound. We will conclude with the transformation of several film industries into propaganda tools during World War II (including the Nazi, Soviet, and US film industries). In addition to contemporary theories that investigate the development of cinema and visual culture during the first half of the 20th century, we will read key texts that contributed to the emergence of film theory. There are no prerequisites. Students are required to attend screenings or watch films on their own.

You cannot build a wall to stop the free flow of literary and creative ideas. But in constructing narratives of national identity, states have long adopted particular texts as "foundational." Very often these texts have been epics or romances designated "medieval," that is, associated with the period in which specific vernaculars or "mother tongues" first emerged. France and Germany, for example, have long fought over who "owns" the Strasbourg oaths, or the Chanson de Roland; new editions of this epic poem, written in French but telling of Frankish (Germanic) warriors, have been produced (on both sides) every time these two countries go to war. In this course we will thus study both a range of "medieval" texts and the ways in which they have been claimed, edited, and disseminated to serve particular nationalist agendas. Particular attention will be paid to the early nineteenth century, and to the 1930s. Delicate issues arise as nations determine what their national epic needs to be. Russia, for example, needs the text known as The Song of Igor to be genuine, since it is the only Russian epic to predate the Mongol invasion. The text was discovered in 1797 and then promptly lost in Moscow's great fire of 1812; suggestions that it might have been a fake have to be handled with care in Putin's Russia. Similarly, discussing putative Mughal (Islamic) elements in so-called "Hindu epics" can also be a delicate matter. Some "uses of the medieval" have been exercised for reactionary and revisionist causes in the USA, but such use is much more extravagant east of Prague. And what, exactly, is the national epic of the USA? What, for that matter, of England? Beowulf has long been celebrated as an English Ur-text, but is set in Denmark, is full of Danes (and has been claimed for Ulster by Seamus Heaney). Malory's Morte Darthur was chosen to provide scenes for the queen's new robing room (following the fire that largely destroyed the Palace of Westminster in 1834), but Queen Victoria found the designs unacceptable: too much popery and adultery. Foundations of literary history still in force today are rooted in nineteenth-century historiography: thus we have The Cambridge History of Italian Literature and The Cambridge History of German Literature, each covering a millennium, even though political entities by the name of Italy and Germany did not exist until the later nineteenth century. What alternative ways of narrating literary history might be found? Itinerary models, which do not observe national boundaries, might be explored, and also the cultural history of watercourses, such as the Rhine, Danube, or Nile. The exact choice of texts to be

Course varies with instructor.

Topics vary each semester. Fall 2019: "When industry erupts in the sphere of art," Baudelaire famously wrote in 1859, "it becomes the latter's mortal enemy, and in the resulting confusion of functions none is well carried out...If photography is allowed to deputize for art in some of art's activities, it will not be long before it has supplanted or corrupted art altogether...Photography must, therefore, return to its true duty, which is handmaid of the arts and sciences." History has not been kind to this argument. First, Henry Fox Talbot and many of his contemporaries attributed the photographic image to nature, not industry, and the same is true of a number of contemporary artists. Second, by 1842--three years after the official invention of photography--photographers had already begun hand-coloring their daguerreotypes, and a century and a half later Richter started smearing and spattering paint onto small photographs, and exhibiting them along with his abstract and figurative paintings. By the mid-1850's, many artists were also painting from photographs, sometimes by projecting them onto their canvases, and treating these projections as preparatory drawings. They called the resulting images photo-paintings. And although it became increasingly "disreputable" to work in this way as the century progressed,

Topics vary from year to year.

An advanced seminar in anglophone African literature, possibly including a few works in translation.

The extent to which the narrative reflexes of the novel can accommodate and express the nature of human work are explored primarily in a study of two nineteenth-century writers. Eliot and Hardy. Reading for the course also includes novels and short stories of other nineteenth-century writers (Dickens, Zola, tolstoy, Stowe, Melville), and background reading on the social and philosophic theory of work.

A study of the tradition of "serio-comic" literature from ancient times to the present, focusing on works that combine ostensibly incompatible tones, genres, and themes to produce a particular sense of man in history. Readings include: the dialogues of Lucian, Petronius' SATYRICON, extracts from Rabelais and Boccaccio, GULLIVER'S TRAVELS, extracts from Sterne, and Gogol's DEAD SOULS. Students will be expected to attend a series of undergraduate lectures on these works; an additional hour will be scheduled in which the history and theory of menippean satire will be discussed. Special attention is given to general problems of genre theory that are raised by works that seem to challenge generic norms.

Within the last ten or fifteen years, there has been a flowering of scholarship revealing the diversity of oral verbal art worldwide. The course surveys a selection of recent book-length studies of specific narrative and other verbal art traditions in their cultural contexts. We will move from North Africa through the Middle East, South Asia, Australia, the western Pacific, and native America, examining particular traditions and texts, the ways they intersect with their societies, and the ways different scholars have found to document and interpret them.