Course Offerings
I. Introductory
160a and b. Approaches to Media Studies (1)
This course explores concepts and issues in the study of media, attentive to but not limited by the question of the “new” posed by new media technologies. Our survey of key critical approaches to media is anchored in specific case studies drawn from a diverse archive of media artifacts, industries, and technologies: from phonograph to photography, cinema to networked hypermedia, from typewriter to digital code. We examine the historical and material specificity of different media technologies and the forms of social life they enable, engage critical debates about media, culture and power, and consider problems of reading posed by specific media objects and processes, new and old. We take the multi-valence of “media”—a term designating text and apparatus of textual transmission, content and conduit—as a central problem of knowledge for the class. Our goal throughout is to develop the research tools, modes of reading, and forms of critical practice that help us aptly to describe and thereby begin to understand the increasingly mediated world in which we live. Ms. Cohen, Mr. Joyce
II. Intermediate
250b. Medium Specificity (1)
Medium specificity is a consideration of what makes a medium a medium. The emergence of so-called new media has called attention to the ways in which new forms borrow upon or “remediate” older forms. By asking what aspects a particular medium can surrender to another without losing its particularity, we can form provisional representations of the essential aspects of a given medium, new or old, which differentiate it from others. The course considers old and new media including literature, photography, film, television, computer games, immersive computer environments, new media art, and digital image manipulation, sometimes viewing them comparatively in order to isolate those cultural, economic, and ideological structures which have led to the construction, identification, and conservation of a specific medium. The program faculty.
May be repeated for credit if the topic has changed. Prerequisite: Media Studies 160 or by permission of instructor.
Topic for 2008/09: Serious Play: Computer Games in Contemporary Culture. This course explores the medium of computer and video games, as a form of play and entertainment, as an important economic and cultural force, and in relation to other narrative forms, such as fiction and film. Questions raised in the course focus on how games work, what kinds of games are being produced (and not produced); why people play video games, who plays them, and how video games affect behavior; the economic structure of the gaming industry and tie-ins to other industries such as entertainment and military; the representational content of games and the broader and differential impacts of games on culture and society. Students address these questions by playing, observing and critically evaluating popular video games, as well as games of their own creation, in the context of theoretical and critical readings on the gaming phenomenon. Ms. Cohen, Mr. Ellman.
260b. Media Theory (1)
This course aims to ramify our understanding of “mediality”—that is, the visible and invisible, audible and silent contexts in which physical messages stake their ghostly meanings. The claims of media theory extend beyond models of communication: media do not simply transport preexisting ideas, nor do they merely shape ideas in transit. Attending to the complex network of functions that make up media ecologies (modes of inscription, transmission, storage, circulation, and retrieval) demonstrates the role media play not only in the molding of ideas and opinions, but also in the constitution of subjectivities, social spheres, and non-human circuits of exchange (images, information, capital). Texts and topics vary from year to year, but readings are drawn from a broad spectrum of classical and contemporary sources. Ms. Brawley.
Prerequisite: Media Studies 160 or by permission of instructor.
264b. The Avant-Gardes, 1889-1929 (1)
(Same as Art 264b)
[265b. Modern Art and Mass Media, 1929-1968] (1)
(Same as Art 265b) Instructor to be announced..
266b. Indigenous and Oppositional Media (1)
(Same as Anthropology 266b) Ms. Cohen.
268a. The Times: 1968-now (1)
(Same as Art 268a) Instructor to be announced.
290 a or b. Field Work (1/2 or 1)
Permission of the director required.
298 a or b. Independent Study (1/2 or 1)
Permission of the director required.
III. Advanced
300. Senior Project (1)
A full-length thesis or (multi)media project. Students design their projects in consultation with the Program Director and a senior project adviser. Senior Project proposals are evaluated by the program Steering Committee, and all projects are publicly presented and become part of a permanent media archive at the College. The program faculty.
302b. Adaptations (1)
(Same as College Course 302) If works of art continue each other, as Virginia Woolf suggested, then cultural history accumulates when generations of artists think and talk together across time. What happens when one of those artists radically changes the terms of the conversation by switching to another language, another genre, another mode or medium? What constitutes a faithful adaptation? In this course we briefly consider the biological model and then explore analogies across a wide range of media. We begin with Metamorphoses, Ovid’s free adaptations of classical myths, and follow Medea and Orpheus through two thousand years of theater (from Euripides to Anouilh, Williams, and Durang); paintings (Greek vases and Pompeian walls to Dürer, Rubens, Poussin, Denis, and Klee); film and television (Pasolini, von Trier, Cocteau, Camus); dance (Graham, Balanchine, Noguchi, Bausch); music (Cavalli, Charpentier, Milhaud, Barber, Stravinsky, Birtwistle, Glass); narratives and graphic narratives (Woolf, Moraga, Pynchon, Gaiman); verse (Rilke, Auden, Milosz); and computer games (Mutants and Masterminds, Fate/stay night). We may also analyze narratives and graphic narratives by Clowes, Collins, Ishiguro, Groening, Joyce, Lahiri, Malcolm X, Mann, Millhauser, Nabokov, Pekar, Shakespeare, Spiegelman, Swift, Tanizaki, and Wilde; films by Bharadwaj, Berman/Pucini, Camus, Dangarembga, Ichikawa, Ivory, Kubrick, Kurosawa, Lee, Lyne, Mendes, Nair, Sembene, Visconti, and Zwigoff-, remixes by DJ Spooky and Danger Mouse; sampling; cover bands, tribute bands; Wikipedia, wikicomedy, wikiality; and of course Adaptation, Charlie and Donald Kaufman’s screenplay for Spike Jonze’s film, based very very loosely on Susan Orlean’s Orchid Thief. Ms. Mark.
By special permission.
One 3-hour period.
310a. Senior Seminar (1)
Special topics course for all senior Media Studies majors, providing a capstone experience for the cohort. This course is taught in the Fall semester each year. Mr. Joyce.
Prerequisite: Media Studies 250 or Media Studies 260.
[352b. The City in Fragments] (1)
(Same as Urban Studies 352b). Ms. Brawley, Mr. Chang.
Not offered in 2008/09.
[356. Culture, Commerce, and the Public Sphere] (1)
(Same as Sociology 356) Mr. Hoynes.
362b. The Thousand and One Nights (1)
(Same as English 362 and College Course 362) Ms. Mark.
379b. Computer Animation: Art, Sciences and Criticism (1)
(Same as Art 379b and Computer Science 379b)An interdisciplinary course in Computer Animation aimed at students with previous experience in Computer Science, Studio Art, or Media Studies. The course introduces students to mathematical and computational principles and techniques for describing the shape, motion and shading of three-dimensional figures in Computer Animation. It introduces students to artistic principles and techniques used in drawing, painting and sculpture, as they are translated into the context of Computer Animation. It also encourages students to critically examine Computer Animation as a medium of communication. Finally, the course exposes students to issues that arise when people from different scholarly cultures attempt to collaborate on a project of mutual interest. The course is structured as a series of animation projects interleaved with screenings and classroom discussions. A weekly laboratory period provides guided hands-on experience. Mr. Ellman, Mr. Roseman.
[385a. Media and War] (1)
Senator Hiram Johnson’s 1917 remark “The first casualty when war comes is truth” is often repeated. But the processes through which (mis)information and images circulate in wartime are less well known. This course explores the role of popular media in the production and circulation of knowledge about war. Drawing on both news and entertainment media, we examine how war is represented and remembered in various media, including newspapers, photographs, radio, television, film, and online. Through a series of historical and contemporary case studies, we explore topics such as the practices of the war correspondent, strategies of news management by military planners, the relationship between media images and public attitudes toward war, media as a propaganda tool, and the role of popular media in constructing and contesting national myths and memories of war. Mr. Hoynes.
Prerequisites: Media Studies 160 or by permission of instructor.
Not offered in 2008/09.