Upcoming Courses

Upcoming Graduate Seminars for Spring 2024

CHIN 2059 Adapted for the Screen: Chinese Literature and Film

Kun Qian, 358 Cathedral of Learning, Mondays. 1:00pm to 4:50pm

Adaptation is a common practice in Chinese cinema. A number of well-known films such as Farewell My Concubine and Raise the Red Lantern are adapted from fiction. In these cases, fiction lends itself to cinematic imagination and recreation on the screen, and film provides special perspectives to look at fiction. Sometimes, cinematic techniques also inspire the creative style of fiction. The difference in medium of expression, channel of circulation, targeted audience, and historical contexts in which they were produced create a cross-media “super-text” with complex implications. This course offers a chance to examine some canonical novels and novellas together with the films adapted from them in order to explore verbal and visual representations in modern China. In particular, we will focus on issues of history, romance, gender, sexuality, and body politics, and how they are represented in both fiction and film. We will also explore adaptation from a broader sense of transmediality, examining how the change of medium/media helps shape spectatorship and modes of engaging with the world.

 

ENGFLM 2491/FMST 2440 Film Sound: History, Theory, Aesthetics

Neepa Majumdar, 407 Cathedral of Learning, Mondays 6:00pm to 9:50pm

Although much of this course's emphasis will be on the history, theory, and aesthetics of cinematic sound, the approach will be through debates in the field of sound studies. Considering film sound as a particular case in the wider context of soundscapes and acoustic ecologies, sonic cultures and practices of listening, sound and the other senses, and the industrialization of sound will provide students with a historically grounded model on which they might base their own research on cinematic or non-cinematic sound practices. Topics to be discussed will include the relation of sound and image, voice and body, aural and visual pleasures, the ontological status of recorded sound, the relation of sound technologies and modernity, and questions of sound and space ranging from the space of the film to culturally specific theories of sound. While the course will provide a historical overview of film sound, there will be two moments of emphasis: the transition from the sonic practices of silent to sound cinema, and the transition from analog to digital sound.


Previously Taught Graduate Seminars 

Fall 2023

Spring 2023

Fall 2022

Spring 2022

Fall 2021

Spring 2021

Fall 2020

Spring 2020