Senior Seminar: The Undead
Spring, 2012
This seminar seeks to examine the significance of the increasing proliferation of the figure of the undead (in film, in theory, and in literature). The course not only explores works that present the undead as a sign of the failure of being properly remembered or mourned or, more profoundly, as an indication of the failure of the very rites and rituals that help render the biological as the symbolic dead. More than this, the course seeks to consider how in films such as Kiyoshi Kurasowa’s Pulse or Gore Verbinski’s The Ring, the dead return from the grave in part to illumine their relatively more vital, if still troubled, existence when compared to the psychically numb living beings they have left behind. The course, that is, spends considerable time taking up work that charts the threat to the vitality of psychic life posed by consumerism, mass media, fundamentalism, and related assaults on affective relations with others and on non-standardized thought and expression. Among the topics likely to be engaged: trauma, melancholia, reanimation, zombies and automatons, organ transplants, brain death, phantom limbs, biopolitics and the human. In addition to the aforementioned, films likely to be screened include Night of the Living Dead (1968), Otto; or Up with Dead People (2008), The Others (2001), Speaking Parts (1989), Mysterious Skin (2004), Gods and Monsters (1998), Pet Sematary (1989), Blink (1994), The Sixth Sense (1999), The Eye (2002). Literature likely to be read: Sophocles’s Antigone, Pat Barker’s Regeneration, W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden, Jim Crace’s Being Dead, Joyce Carol Oates’s Zombie, Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved. Among the theoretical works to be taken up: Julia Kristeva’s New Maladies of the Soul, Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz, Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience, Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics.
Screening Film Noir
Fall, 2010
This course critically examines some distinctive stylistic and thematic features of noir as it emerged in its classic period and as it returns in contemporary American cinema. The course explores, for instance, the shadow world that obscures vision for on-screen characters and film spectators alike; the uncanny voiceover narration of dying or dead/alive figures; the “private eye” and his struggle to find a path through many a labyrinth — whether it be the criminal justice system that at times appears unfathomable or as densely corrupt as the mob syndicates it is tasked with eradicating or the intricate laws of desire that present no less dangerous a challenge. The course will spend time exploring the “noir anxiety” that emerges around identity as it relates to historical trauma, sexual roles, and race and ethnicity — and do so with an eye toward assessing the critical social commentary offered by both classic and neo-noir cinema. Films screened include Laura, Crossfire, Mildred Pierce, The Lady from Shanghai, Kiss Me Deadly, Taxi Driver, Suture, Bound, Twin Peaks, Sin City, This Is Not a Love Song.
Heavenly Creatures
Spring 2011
This course explores the historical development of the Hollywood star system and the complex role stars play in American film and culture. Focusing on representative classic and contemporary film “stars,” the course analyzes how stars are produced by the studio system and its remnants in contemporary Hollywood and global cinema and in turn remade in the cultural imaginary. (We will follow scholars who interpret the star as a form of labor, generated to raise a profit, to promote and sell films.) At the same time, we will consider how stars are received and even remade by audiences, especially marginal groups. Stars to be examined include: Joan Crawford, Rock Hudson, Halle Berry, Johnny Depp. Among the films to be screened: Dancing Lady, A Woman’s Face, Humoresque, Magnificent Obsession, Seconds, Pillow Talk, Heavenly Creatures, Warhol: A Documentary, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, Monster’s Ball, Edward Scissorhands, Vertigo, Female Trouble, A Star Is Born.
Film Analysis
Fall 2011
This course introduces students to the critical analysis of film. We explore the issue of film genre and the fundamentals of film form, examining principles of narration and narrative construction in the “Classical Hollywood” cinema; in this context, we also consider the properties of nonnarrative formal systems by looking closely at documentary, abstract, and avant-garde film. In the third part of the course, we take up fundamental elements of film style: mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound. And, in the last part of the course, we analyze the relation between film and the literary text. Throughout the course we explore seminal work in film theory, including structuralism and poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and theories of race and representation. Films screened range from work by Murnau, Curtiz, Franju, and Morris to Campion, Tykwer, Varda, Araki, and the Brothers Quay.
Critical and Cultural Theory
Spring 2010
This course introduces students to some important theoretical approaches to literature: psychoanalysis, structuralism, deconstruction, feminism, gender studies, queer theory, and cultural studies. The course explores major assumptions informing each approach, suggests something of the varied voices within each field, and attends to the ways in which these approaches to the literary text remain distinct and yet often speak to, and influence, each other in compelling ways. Works examined include texts by Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Constance Penley, Tim Dean, Lee Edelman, Leslie Rogers, William Wordsworth, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, and films by Michelangelo Antonioni, Sebastien Lifshitz, and Spike Jonze.
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Vincent J. Hausmann is an Associate Professor of English at Furman University, where he teaches cinema studies and literary theory. He has published on Bernardo Bertolucci, Joseph Conrad, and Paul Bowles, and coedits Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature.