Humanities and Philosophy Courses with Bernard Roddy

Humanities 122: Contemporary Culture and the Arts

This is an introduction to cultural studies.  Our focus will be on visual representation, which includes the history of art, film, television, advertising, and technology.  Several valuable philosophical ideas will be used to examine contemporary culture.  Many of these have been most developed from the point of view of 20th century thinkers concerned about the impact of new technologies on society.  How, for example, did media work in Nazi Germany?  Just as you might feel that watching television all day makes for an uneducated people, important cultural theorists have reflected on social, economic, and technological developments since the first world war.  We will therefore be taking a big picture of new developments like the internet, trying to recognize these changes in culture from a bird’s eye perspective.  We’ll use two textbooks, one of which has been used in the course before.  This text, Practices of Looking, will give students a good handle on how to critically look at the images we see in our everyday lives.  The other one, The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, will provide a more developed historical sense of the world we live in, where we have been, and how all this affects the way we think.  The course is therefore an exciting tour through cultural changes up to the turn of the 21st century, and you’ll be able to pick up some very useful concepts to apply along the way.

Humanities 160: Introduction to Film

This course is an introduction to film studies.  The emphasis of the course is on the history of critical thought about cinema.  We will cover central developments within the history of film – including Soviet montage, the French New Wave, recent films from India – but we will also be looking at films from the perspective of critical thought about the function of the cinema in culture at large.  So, for example, we will study feminist film criticism, developments in gay and lesbian film production and criticism, and American films featuring African Americans.  We’ll be focusing on the ways in which films express ideas about social relations amongst races, what our collective fantasies reveal about us, and trying to identify films that exhibit a wider array of attitudes.  The course thus tries to frame discussion about film in terms of such questions as who is watching and who is supposed to be watching.  What assumptions are being made?  Besides offering a good brief history of the cinema as a developing industry, the course will include the critical tools you need to talk about the way narrative films work, concepts for discussing their aesthetics, their strengths and weaknesses from the point of view of how “good” they are.  We will also examine the history of nonfiction film (“documentary”) and reflect on the ways in which these productions differ from fiction or narrative film.  Students will come away from the course with a deep appreciation of the significance of film as a medium of mass communication and its history in terms of its aesthetic and ideological dimensions.  Film studies is about understanding why film is important and trying to discover new ways in which the cinema is pushing the boundaries of Western conceptions of others.

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