An introduction to literary study that helps students develop the skills necessary for college-level reading, writing, research and critical thinking. Through exposure to a variety of literary forms and genres, historical periods and critical approaches, students are taught how to read closely, argue effectively and develop a strong writing voice. The course is reading and writing intensive and organized around weekly assignments. There are no waivers for LAS-E101 except for transfer students who have taken an equivalent college course.

First-year Students are pre-registered for this course by the department.

Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Transfer Students register into designated section(s).

Major Requirement | BFA

An introduction to literary study that helps students develop the skills necessary for college-level reading, writing, research and critical thinking. Through exposure to a variety of literary forms and genres, historical periods and critical approaches, students are taught how to read closely, argue effectively and develop a strong writing voice. The course is reading and writing intensive and organized around weekly assignments. There are no waivers for LAS-E101 except for transfer students who have taken an equivalent college course.

First-year Students are pre-registered for this course by the department.

Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Transfer Students register into designated section(s).

Major Requirement | BFA

Alfred Hitchcock famously revealed that he looked not for a story to tell but a visual problem to solve. With a career that spanned silent to sound, black-and-white to color and film to television, Hitchcock mastered all time-arts media while consistently focused on representing our manias, monsters, and madness. He was a sly cultural commentator of his milieu, filming the first serial killer movie, the first natural disaster flick, and the first psychological thrillers. As a result, his films provide a basic education in filmmaking as well as critical analyses of popular social context. This course attempts to cover the breath of Hitchcock's oeuvre focusing on both his masterful cinematic techniques and his jaundiced analyses of modern society. In addition to Hitchcock's films and television productions, we will read Hitchcock's own comments on filmmaking, significant popular socio-historical texts and film theory. We will also look to recent international revisions of Hitchcock by Jordan Peele, Pedro Almod≤var, Lou Ye, Yim Ho and others. Regular papers will synthesize all required texts to master the Master.

Elective

Taking its cue from Clint Eastwood who proclaimed, As far as I'm concerned, Americans don't have any original art except Western movies and jazz, this course will analyze the Western film as an art form in and of itself. We will discuss Westerns in terms of their specific aesthetic and technological influence on the medium, their cultural expression of a national political unconscious, and their global function as the meta-narrative of space. This course will tackle these discussions through a chronological unfolding of the genre starting with the Edison Company's 1898 Westerns and Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903) through the Golden Age of John Ford and Howard Hawks' films and the reciprocal translation of Akira Kurosawa's epics, and finally, to the variants of the Spaghetti, Revisionist, and genre-bending contemporary and postmodern Westerns of Dennis Hopper, Sam Peckinpah, John Sayles, Jim Jarmusch, Ang Lee, and Wim Wenders. There will be required readings in critical film theory, weekly screenings, analytical essays, and oral presentations.

Elective