Humanities Courses with Laurence Knapp

Humanities 160: Introduction to Film

This course is designed to introduce students to film as both art and commercial media. Students will learn to notice the subtleties of film style (mise-en-scene, cinematography, sound, editing) and narrative (Hollywood cinema, art cinema, national cinema, documentary, and the avant-garde) by watching classical and contemporary films in class. Introduction to Film will conclude with a close analysis of how genre, star performance, style, narrative, technology, and ideology influence Steven Spielberg’s cinema and our own expectations as spectators. Each student will be asked to analyze Spielberg’s Munich by comparing it to his previous work and films screened in class.

Humanities 122: Contemporary Culture and the Arts

What is contemporary culture? What role does art play, and can it be reconciled with popular culture and the mass media? With the rise of postmodernism, the digital age, social diversity, and hyperconsumption (think IKEA and iPod), the traditional division between high and low culture—already weakened by early and mid-twentieth century modernism—is virtually meaningless to anyone born after 1980. This course will encourage students to renegotiate their relationship to the arts, media, and our post-9/11 zeitgeist by exploring works of fiction (George Orwell’s 1984 and Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent), graphic novels (Peter Bagge’s Buddy Does Seattle and Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan), topical memoirs (Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation), feature films (Office Space, The Virgin Suicides, Natural Born Killers, Tupac: Resurrection, Left Behind: The Movie, The Passion of the Christ, Equilibrium, Kids, Videodrome, Ten, Happy Together, and Rent), and television (Spike Lee’s HBO documentary When the Levee Broke and Joe Dante’s Showtime short Homecoming, among others). Dr. Jean Twenge’s Generation Me, a social study of young America, will be assigned to facilitate discussion and dialogue.

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