This course examines in detail the fabric of urban and suburban settlement and commerce in the pre and post WW-II U.S. Field trips to the greater Springfield area are used to allow students to develop firsthand understanding of interactions between urban and suburban areas and to recognize the major changes to the human landscape driven by suburbanization and urban abandonment. This class will examine the section of Springfield slated for the MGM Casino Development.

Study of representations of the body in French and Francophone fiction, film and art. How has embodiment been conceived across time and culture? What concepts of beauty, gender, race, class, sexuality, and age do the works communicate? How do representations of bodies convey power and desire? What forms of violence and monstrousness appear? Theoretical readings (Descartes, Freud, Beauvoir, Fanon, Foucault, Chebel) plus possible authors and films: Rabelais; Moliere; Balzac; Gide; Colette; Duras; Blais; Djemai; Warner-Vieyra; Rawiri; Un chien andalou; Cleo de 5 a 7; Le Jardin parfume.

This course will examine contemporary autobiographical narratives written by women, with a particular focus on authors whose works include multiple autobiographical texts of various genres: fictional, nonfictional, and semifictional. We will analyze the ways in which these authors present their life stories, especially the traumatic or secret episodes, and the ways in which their works discuss the process of that presentation and of memory itself. Themes that are common to these autobiographical texts include: relationships with family, education, sexuality, class, and love.

Seduction and Tyranny: Targeting the institution of marriage that enables fathers and husbands to behave as absolute masters, Moliere, Marivaux and Beaumarchais advocate equality and justice for wives, daughters and servants. Students will study plays by Moliere (L'ecole des femmes, Tartuffe, Don Juan), Marivaux (La fausse suivante, l'ile des esclaves), Beaumarchais (Le barbier de Seville, Le mariage de Figaro) . They will watch operas by Mozart (Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni) and Rossini (Il barbiere di Siviglia) and explore relevant films (Moliere, Le roi danse, Beaumarchais}.

This seminar will examine the various screen adaptations of assorted novels by Henry James. We will read the novels against the films, exploring how James's texts translate--or do not translate--into film.

Many critics considered Kathyrn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty to be the best film of 2012, but it was also widely criticized for seeming to promote torture. Movies can be morally dangerous, seemingly endorsing or even promoting immoral or discriminatory ideals, or romanticizing immoral characters and behavior, as in Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs (Thomas Harris, 1991). In this course, we evaluate the arguments given for treating certain movies as immoral, and we examine whether and how our moral evaluations of movies should affect us. When, if ever, are movies immoral?

New Description to Come

This course explores the American Musical Film from its first appearance in the late 1920s in early experiments with sound, through the films of Busby Berkeley and the MCM Musicals to its more recent revival in films such as Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge. The course also examines musical films from other national cinemas that either comment self-reflexively on the genre and its American context and/or expand common definitions of the genre.

The class will study the development of Art Direction and Costume Design for Film and Television from their beginnings in the Twentieth Century to the present. Students will engage in an investigation of the field through written work, visual presentations and practical projects.

(Film Studies Component Course.) An examination of the gothic--a world of fear, haunting, claustrophobia, paranoia, and monstrosity--in American literature and culture, with an emphasis upon issues of race and gender. Topics include the gothic; gothic sexuality; Southern, Northern, and national gothic; freakishness and grotesquerie; and visual gothic. Focus on fiction, with some film and photography.