New Curriculum General Course Descriptions

This course focuses on the history, theory, and experience of old and new media technologies, examining the emergence and implementation of media technologies, the discourses surrounding them, their use by media institutions and/or artists, and the forms, styles, aesthetics, modes of address, and experiences they afford. It also analyzes the histories of media technologies, their theorization by practitioners and scholars, and the various methodologies that have been used to understand their development, use, standardization, modification, and/or obsolescence. The various courses...

This course provides students with an introduction to the field of television studies complete with: a factual foundation in television history across its broadcast, cable, and convergence phases; a conceptual apparatus through which to investigate how televisual form (narrative and aesthetics) dramatizes and problematizes social issues and cultural values; and an analytic procedure or critical operation (close reading of a television text) through which students may compose complex original arguments. This course inherits a concern with television history previously taught in...

The course explores the international development of artist-made, experimental and avant-garde film, electronic or new media practices. It looks at the ways artists have invented new formal languages in order to express their unique ideas and vision, and also how they have created alternative modes of production, distribution, and exhibition for their work. The course examines major movements in experimental and alternative media that exist outside of the constraints of industrial and mass-media forms, as it at once critiques and expands dominant forms of media. Course goals include...

Film 10 is our gateway class for undergraduates possibly interested in the major: it serves both as an introduction to the early history of cinema (from its nineteenth-century prehistory to the sound cinema of the 1930s) and as an introduction to the technical skills necessary for close analysis of film. Topics considered will include the rise of early film, the gradual development of cinematic narrative, the development of national cinematic styles in the 1920s, the transition to sound, and studio filmmaking of the 1930s. The approach is at once historical and aesthetic: students...