Courses / Graduate

Spring 2018

  • Graduate Topics in Film: Media Theories

    240-003 | CCN: 41125

    Jacob Gaboury

    This course will offer an introduction to media theory not as a fixed disciplinary form but as a heterogeneous field of inquiry with multiple and competing origins, influences, and applications. Tracing media theory's early 20th century origins alongside field-defining movements – including the Toronto School, the New York School, and the more recent turn toward so-called German Media Theory – the course will track the expansion of the media concept to its near-universal application across a range of disciplines from film studies and art history to geology and quantum mechanics. Readings include Walter Benjamin, Gilbert Simondon, Martin Heidegger, Harold Innis, Marshal McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, Bernhard Siegert, John Durahm Peters, Jane Bennet, and Karen Barad, among others. On completing the course students will be able to articulate and engage with contemporary debates in media theory, as well as describe the ways in which media theory has transformed over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries.