ENG 381 - Film and New Media Studies

Agency and Identity in New Media Narratives
From hypertexts to video games to livestreams, the storytelling affordances of digital media have captivated creators for nearly half a century. While new media narratives have expressed the liberatory potentials of interactivity and connectivity in their works, they have also raised deep questions about human agency, responsibility, and identity within our increasingly technological world. How are users interpellated within constructs of race, gender, sexuality, and ability as they create an avatar or act within digital spaces? How does the ability to interface with creators or transform narrative outcomes alter one’s relationship to any given story? What are the ethical dilemmas inherent in taking control of virtual bodies, especially those that differ from one’s own? This course aims to allow students to explore these questions for themselves by analyzing a variety of new media texts and putting them in conversation with theories of technology and identity. Potential texts to be analyzed include literary hypertexts such as Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, digital games such as the Fulbright Company’s Gone Home, and digital-native visual media such as Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer.

The City in Film
Shots of the Manhattan skyline or its crowded streets and subways, car chases filmed on new freeways, views into apartments across the way: American cinema of the postwar period showed a particular fascination with the excitement, mobility, and alienation of urban life. These settings in turn shaped the narrative possibilities of film storytelling in the era. In this course we will focus on films from the 1940s and ‘50s that set their action in cities and address the experience of urban life, especially in the contrasting examples of Los Angeles and New York. Film screenings will be accompanied by required readings on the language of film analysis, and on contemporary literature, art, and criticism focused on the modern and postmodern city. Directors will be drawn from among the following: Robert Aldrich, Samuel Fuller, Alfred Hitchcock, Phil Karlson, Fritz Lang, Joseph Lewis, Joseph Losey, Ida Lupino, Anthony Mann, Otto Preminger, Nicholas Ray, Edgar Ulmer, Fred Zinnemann.

History of Animation
This course will provide an overview of the history and methods of the animated cartoon and feature film. Animation - bringing images to life - takes many forms. Traditional cel animation, stop motion, and digital techniques are all used to help create the “illusion of life,” as Disney artists claimed during their Golden Age. Animated films, long considered mere entertainment for children, have tackled the issues of war and peace. This course will examine the popular and the underground, the mature as well as the entertaining. This course will look at the historical, social, political, cultural, and formal background of the last 130 years of animation, charting the rise of the artform from trick photography to the digital revolutions of the last thirty years. Some of the studios and artists we will examine are Disney, UPA, Studio Ghibli, Pixar, Laika, Winsor McCay, Lotte Reiniger, Mary Ellen Bute, Oskar Fischinger, Chuck Jones, Ray Harryhausen, Will Vinton, Brenda Chapman, Henry Selick, Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, Cristóbal León, Joaquin Cociña, Guillermo del Toro, and others.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Prerequisite(s): Two ENG courses at the 200 level or higher
Instructional Method: Conference-screening
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Notes: Not all topics offered every year. Review schedule of classes for availability. Review descriptions for specific applicability to department requirements. Prior experience with film and media studies preferred.
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).