Spring Classes

Zero for Conduct
Tomorrow morning marks the start of our spring semester, and so I thought tonight I'd do my regular pre-term post about what I've got planned.

I'm teaching three classes, one of which I've never taught before. They are Currents in Global Literature, Introduction to Film, and Outlaws, Delinquents, and Other "Deviants" in Film & Society. Let's look at them one by one...

Currents in Global Literature
I taught this course last term, and it's the one that has changed the least. (Here's the syllabus.) It's also probably the last time I will get to teach it, because we're in the midst of hiring a full-time, Ph.D'ed person to do so. Thus, I didn't want to put too much energy and effort into redesigning a course I have no future with. Luckily, last term went really well.

The one big change in the syllabus is that I'm replacing Petals of Blood with The River Between. There was really no choice; A Sentimental Education and Burger's Daughter are both pretty long and complex, so following them with the long complexities of Petals of Blood was just too much for the students, though they gave it a good shot. I should probably just do a whole course of those three books, but I like having a couple shorter books in there, too. So Petals of Blood had to go. River Between is fine, but it's simpler and not as perfect for our theme of "revolution", so I'm definitely disappointed. If the term were even just one week longer, we'd still be able to fit Petals of Blood in, but I just couldn't make it work with the current schedule. We may not even get to do River Between — just last week, the campus bookstore let me know they can't get copies from their distributor because the book is effectively out of print. It's still perfectly available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc., so I'm going to see if the students are willing to order copies themselves (if they haven't done so already). If not, we'll have to drop it.

Introduction to Film
I taught this course a few semesters ago, and it went okay, but I'm thrilled to get to teach it again because I learned so much the first time about what works and doesn't work in a lower-level undergraduate film class. I'd never taken such a course as a student, having instead had much more specific sorts of film classes ("International Comedy 1940-now", etc.), so even wrapping my brain around the idea of introducing all the various ways of approaching film was pretty difficult. I don't think I've come up with a brilliant new approach or anything now, but I've certainly changed the class a lot. (Here's the syllabus.)

What precipitated the biggest changes was our wonderful library being willing to order a lot of new DVDs to build up our collection. It's certainly nowhere near comprehensive now, but we've at least got enough films to cover most genres and eras of Hollywood film, plus some good examples of international and experimental films. This has changed my pedagogy, because I'm now able to make group activities based around different movies a substantial element of the class. Instead of us all watching the same movies, there are now a few different mechanisms to allow student choice. Each student has to do a presentation with a partner about a film everybody else has not watched, and often these are not specific films (e.g., the first pair presents on "A silent feature (60+ minutes)", etc.).

Similarly, I'm not assigning any specific pages in our textbooks (about which more in a moment). Instead, students will mine the books for information they use in their class activities. I've created a class website with Google Sites and will add the students as editors of it so that they can create pages for the various sorts of information they find. This will all be organized not only by the specific activities, but by the fact that I'll be giving them all the questions from the final exam early on (probably on our second day). I've used this method in the feminism course I used to teach (before I started doing Communications classes), and found it really helpful as a way to give the students a guide through the huge amount of ideas and information they were exposed to. The course website will, if all goes well, becomes a really great study tool for the final exam, and hopefully that will add to their sense of investment in it. We'll see.

The textbooks I settled on were the new edition of the one I used last time, The Film Experience edited by Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White, supplemented with The Oxford History of World Cinema. The new edition of Corrigan & White mostly improves the text's clarity and adds some references to movies that have come out since the previous edition was released. I had hoped for some more substantial changes, particularly the book's design — there's a lot more that could be done with the images, as Bordwell & Thompson's Film Art has beautifully shown — but it's still the most intelligently comprehensive introductory film text I've seen, as well as the one closest to my own approach to cinema. The Oxford History is overkill for this course, admittedly, but I love film history so much that I couldn't resist assigning it. And while The Film Experience, especially in the new edition, is terribly expensive (c. $80), used copies of The Oxford History are plentiful and cheap, given that the book has been unchanged since 1996. (And given Oxford UP's move to work-for-hire contracts for all contributors, I'm perfectly happy for students to buy used copies that won't send money to that publisher.)

What films are we watching? Here's the list of ones we'll see in full, both in and out of class:

Sherlock, Jr (Keaton, 45 mins) & Duck Soup (McCarey/Marx Bros., 68 mins)
Fitzcarraldo (Herzog, 158 mins)
Casablanca (Curtiz, 102 mins)
Breathless (Godard, 90 mins)
La Jetee (Marker, 28 mins)
Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov, 68 mins)
Edge of Heaven (Akin, 116 mins)
Plastic Bag (Bahrani, 18 mins)
Miami Vice (theatrical version) (Mann, 134 mins)
Broken Blossoms (Griffith, 90 mins)
Vampyr (Dreyer, 73 mins)
Written on the Wind (Sirk, 99 mins)
Touch of Evil (restored version) (Welles, 95 mins)
Psycho (Hitchcock, 109 mins)
Peeping Tom (Powell, 101 mins)
Black Girl (Sembene, 65 mins)
Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 121 mins)
Children of Men (Cuaron, 109 mins)
Though I lost a bunch of favorites that I included last time, I think this is a more coherent group of films aesthetically, historically, and thematically. It allows us a lot more deliberate time talking about methods of storytelling, effects of genre, etc. I also decided I wanted to challenge the students' knowledge and assumptions about what cinema was, is, and can be. I fear they'll find a lot of it boring, but hopefully I'll be able to show them what to look for to find at least some engagement in each movie.

Outlaws, Delinquents, and Other "Deviants" in Film & Society
I've never taught this course before. It's a general education class based in the Communications & Media Studies department, for whom I've begun teaching one class each term (unfortunately preventing me from teaching any Women's Studies courses during the regular year, since there's now no room in my schedule, and I'm not allowed to teach more than 3 classes per term). The catalogue description is pretty general, basically saying it's a course about people who deviate from social norms. I decided to take that into some particular directions. (The syllabus is here.)

Here are the required films:
The Public Enemy
Border Incident
Pickup on South Street
Clockers
The Outlaw Josey Wales
Hail the Conquering Hero
First Blood
Zero for Conduct
Rebel without a Cause
The Doom Generation
My Own Private Idaho
Women in Cages (selections)
Thelma & Louise
Volver
Carrie
Easy A
So, as you can see from that list, we start with crime, move on to war and its heroes (or "heroes"), spend some time with juvenile delinquents, and end up with a variety of deviant women.

The pedagogy for this course is a bit more traditional than in my Intro to Film course because the subject matter is more specific. I'm still using our textbooks primarily as resource books for the students, though, with only a few specifically assigned readings. The books are The Cinema Book edited by Pam Cook and A Short Guide to Writing About Film by Timothy Corrigan, both of which I've written about before.

Once the term is finished, I'll post a reflection on how it all went. At the moment, I'm as excited as I've ever been for a new term, because I put an awful lot of work into preparing these courses and each one is about a subject I'm really passionate about. With luck, that passion won't reduce me to standing in front of the class each day and saying, "Isn't that just, like, so coool!"

We shall see...

Popular posts from this blog

"Stone Animals" by Kelly Link

If Kelly Link isn't the best short story writer in the U.S., then she's the equal of whoever is. I first came to this conclusion a couple of years ago when I read her story "Lull" in Conjunctions: 39 , and I am absolutely certain of it now that I have read "Stone Animals" in Conjunctions: 43 . (Of course, I've also read her collection Stranger Things Happen , but, much as I admire it, nothing in that book is as breathtaking as the stories she has written since it appeared, particularly the two Conjunctions stories.) "Stone Animals" both employs and parodies the basic elements of suburban psychological realism, the sort of scaffolding John Cheever and so many other writers hung their words and laundry on: a family buying a house and moving into it, a father commuting to a desultory job in the city, a pregnant wife who is uncertain about her marriage, suspicions and allegations of adultery, existentially anxious children, a controlling b...
Read more

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

If you expect Never Let Me Go to be about cloning, you will be disappointed. If you expect to be able to read it as a logical science fiction novel, one that extrapolates an alternate world that makes sense, you will find much to grumble about. You will not be satisfied. You will be annoyed, even bored. You will have missed the point. Cloning is a MacGuffin that Kazuo Ishiguro uses to create symbolic situations and characters that coalesce in a powerful vision of life. The symbolism doesn't quite reach the level of allegory, because it's difficult to assign definite meanings to each scene and person, but nonetheless it quickly becomes difficult not to think about certain themes: mortality, love, fate, memory, art, nature. Each paragraph either illustrates or expands one of these themes. In the first half of the book, the ideas the novel personifies do not gain a lot of emotion, but by the second half of the book the characters have become familiar, their personalitie...
Read more

"Loot" by Nadine Gordimer

I've intended to write about Nadine Gordimer's very short story "Loot" for years, ever since I first read it in The New Yorker , and for some reason I actually thought I had written a post here about it.  I recommended the story to a friend a few days ago and intended to include a link to my post about the story when, after a bit of searching, I realized I'd never written the post.  Now I will fix that mistake. From the first sentence, "Loot" is a story about time and history, about legends and imagination.  "Once upon our time," it tells us, there was a Great Event -- the greatest earthquake every recorded, the greatest of all measured "apocalyptic warnings".  Not only is it a Great Event (indeed, the Greatest of such events), but it is ours: we possess it. The second paragraph details the effects of this greatest event of ours.  Most giant earthquakes at sea produce floods and tsunamis, but not ours -- our special earthquake d...
Read more

The Penny Poet of Portsmouth by Katherine Towler

     Dawn again, and I switch off the light. On the table a tattered moth shrugs its wings.      I agree. Nothing is ever quite what we expect it to be. —Robert Dunn Katherine Towler's deeply affecting and thoughtful portrait of Robert Dunn is subtitled "A Memoir of Place, Solitude, and Friendship". It's an accurate label, but one of the things that makes the book such a rewarding reading experience is that it's a memoir of struggles with place, solitude, and friendship — struggles that do not lead to a simple Hallmark card conclusion, but rather something far more complex. This is a story that could have been told superficially, sentimentally, and with cheap "messages" strewn like sugarcubes through its pages. Instead, it is a book that honors mysteries. You are probably not familiar with the poetry of Robert Dunn , nor even his name, unless you happen to live or have lived in or around Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Even then, you may not ...
Read more

Reflections on Samuel Delany's Dark Reflections

At the Los Angeles Review of Books , I have a new essay about Samuel R. Delany's 2007 novel Dark Reflections , which is about to be released in a new and slightly revised edition by Dover Books . Here's a taste: In many ways,  Dark Reflections  is a narrative companion to Delany’s 2006 collection of essays, letters, and interviews,  About Writing . In the introduction to that book, Delany says that its varied texts share common ideas, primary among them ideas about the art of writing fiction, the structure of the writer’s socio-aesthetic world both in the present and past, and “the way literary reputations grow — and how, today, they don’t grow.” The book is mainly, though not exclusively, aimed at aspiring writers. It provides some advice on craft, but it circles back most insistently to questions of value, and especially to questions of the difference between  good writing  and  talented writing  — and what it means, practically and materially, ...
Read more

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell's debut novel What Belongs to You  is one of the most celebrated and successful gay novels of 2016. Its success seems to me both odd and gratifying. It is a book that garnered the attention of the literati, and not just the gay literati, though it certainly has that (Edmund White blessed it with a blurb). It received praiseful notice from nearly all the major literary institutions in the U.S. (and elsewhere). It is a remarkable novel, but were I a literary agent or publisher, much of what makes the novel remarkable would have caused me to assume it would not sell very well and would find, at best, a niche audience. (This is perhaps reason #28,302 that it's good I'm neither a publisher nor an agent!) I don't know the sales figures for What Belongs to You , but it hit the LA Times  bestseller list for a couple weeks, got tremendous review coverage, and often seemed to be among the books of the moment — I traveled a lot during 2016, and nearly everyw...
Read more

The Snowtown Murders

The Snowtown Murders  (aka Snowtown ) inevitably draws comparisons to another brutal and disturbing Australian crime movie, Animal Kingdom , with which it shares some general plot elements and stylistic moves (both films were shot by Adam Arkapaw ). But where  Animal Kingdom  shows one young man's struggle to stay innocent in a family of thieves and murderers, Snowtown  depicts the power of a small-time messiah to employ hatred as an excuse for torture and murder. Both films focus their narrative on a quiet (eventually traumatized) adolescent surrounded by monsters, but Animal Kingdom,  for all its virtues, is primarily a drama of demons and angels fighting for a soul, whereas Snowtown  is less allegorical, less schematic, and more deeply disturbing. (A more meaningful comparison than with Animal Kingdom  would be with  Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer .) Though in some ways Snowtown  is the story of how Jamie Vlassakis goes fro...
Read more