Courses

Over the centuries, readers have been drawn to accounts of “true” crime—violent narratives involving real people and real events. And yet, as with any literary object, the notion of “truth” is always unstable—stories and their tellings are always shaped by the motivations, values, and choices of those who tell them, often with an eye toward the audience that will consume them. Whether constructed in order to moralize, to enforce or critique social or political ideologies, or purely to sell copies, “true
crime” is a literary genre that reveals attitudes about gender, race, and class; that illustrates—and sometimes calls into question—cultural norms and mores; that calls on readers to reflect on their own morbid curiosity and assumptions and fears. In this class we will engage with a diverse selection of literary texts—spanning from the Middle Ages to the present day and from a range of genres, including pamphlets, plays, novels, and more—as well as contemporary films, a tv series, and a
podcast. Through close reading and critical analysis, we will examine the evolution of the “true crime” genre and the cultural and societal contexts that shape the portrayal of crime for popular consumption. We will explore the ways in which texts and authors sensationalize, moralize, and convey the complexities of crime. We will analyze point of view: who’s telling the story, whom we sympathize with, and what insights we get into the minds of those committing crimes as well as those who fall prey to them. We will consider justice and policing— the role played by the law and its enforcers in shaping narratives about crime and punishment, right and wrong. Finally, we will reflect on the ethical implications of representing real-life crimes in literature, and how “true crime” narratives shape social perceptions, fears, prejudices, and notions of justice and morality.

Over the centuries, readers have been drawn to accounts of “true” crime—violent narratives involving real people and real events. And yet, as with any literary object, the notion of “truth” is always unstable—stories and their tellings are always shaped by the motivations, values, and choices of those who tell them, often with an eye toward the audience that will consume them. Whether constructed in order to moralize, to enforce or critique social or political ideologies, or purely to sell copies, “true
crime” is a literary genre that reveals attitudes about gender, race, and class; that illustrates—and sometimes calls into question—cultural norms and mores; that calls on readers to reflect on their own morbid curiosity and assumptions and fears. In this class we will engage with a diverse selection of literary texts—spanning from the Middle Ages to the present day and from a range of genres, including pamphlets, plays, novels, and more—as well as contemporary films, a tv series, and a
podcast. Through close reading and critical analysis, we will examine the evolution of the “true crime” genre and the cultural and societal contexts that shape the portrayal of crime for popular consumption. We will explore the ways in which texts and authors sensationalize, moralize, and convey the complexities of crime. We will analyze point of view: who’s telling the story, whom we sympathize with, and what insights we get into the minds of those committing crimes as well as those who fall prey to them. We will consider justice and policing— the role played by the law and its enforcers in shaping narratives about crime and punishment, right and wrong. Finally, we will reflect on the ethical implications of representing real-life crimes in literature, and how “true crime” narratives shape social perceptions, fears, prejudices, and notions of justice and morality.

This course provides an introduction to Shakespeare through a combination of reading his plays and viewing them in performance. On the one hand, we approach each play as a written, published text: our in-class conversation consist primarily in close analysis of key passages, and, in one class period, we visit Rare Books to examine the earliest printed versions of the plays in light of English Renaissance print technology. On the other hand, we view performances of each assigned play, including the attendance as a group of at least one Shakespeare production on an NYC stage. Our semester’s through line is to trace, from his earliest plays to Hamlet, Shakespeare’s remarkable development of the techniques of characterization that have made generations of both playgoers and readers feel that his dramatis personae are so modern, real, human. We will also devote attention to exploring the value of each play in our present moment and on our local stages. We read 8 plays in all, including Titus Andronicus, Midsummer Night's Dream, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet.

Walt Whitman was not the first to write about New York. But he was the first of many to let New York write him. By age 43, Whitman had composed most of his best poetry, published three editions of Leaves of Grass, and left New York only twice. How did the second son of an unsuccessful farmer, a grammar school dropout and hack writer become America’s greatest poet? This course offers a response to this perennial mystery of literary scholarship by proposing that “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son” was indeed a product of his environment. Coming of age as a writer at the same time the city was emerging as a great metropolis, he received his education and inspiration from New York itself. Course time is equally divided between discussions of Whitman’s antebellum poetry, journalism, and prose (including the newly recovered Life and Adventures of Jack Engle) in their cultural and geographical contexts, and on-site explorations that retread Whitman’s footsteps through Brooklyn and his beloved Mannahatta. Experiential learning is further encouraged through assignments based in archives, museums, and at historic sites throughout the city.

In 2013, Alice Munro was honored with the Nobel Prize in literature. Munro’s award was seen as a literary landmark: the first time that the prize was awarded to a writer whose exclusive form was the short story. The award was seen as fitting recognition, not only for this writer in particular, but also more broadly as moment of recognition for the short story’s importance as a genre, especially in a publishing industry that has long been dominated by the novel.

In this course, we will focus on the contemporary North American short story authors featured on our syllabus: Chimamanda Adichie, George Saunders, Lydia Davis, Carmen Machado, Leanne Simpson, Anthony Veasna So. Some of the writers on this list are veterans of the short story form. Others are authors who recently published debut collections. As we work through our reading list, we will attempt to analyze not only individual short stories, but also what marks these books as collections. What might hold these texts together? What disrupts the unifying principles of a collection? And most importantly, what do short stories offer—in terms of representations of American life and culture and itscomplexity—that other forms do not?

In this seminar, we will study “Sally Rooney.” In so doing, we will talk about the real author of that name: a thirty-year old Irishwoman whose three novels, each set in Ireland and concerning the social and erotic lives of attractive young people of European descent, have achieved remarkable commercial and critical success. We will talk about the pleasures of those texts, as well as their formal and generic features, their language and their relation to literary history.  But we will also discuss the idea and institution named “Sally Rooney,” considering it as what Michel Foucault called an “author function,” or what Pierre Bourdieu dubbed a “space of possibilities” within the literary field.

Our inquiry into “Sally Rooney” will, therefore, also be an inquiry into the meaning of literary authorship in the twenty-first century. Through secondary readings in criticism and theory, we will engage longstanding arguments about the relation between critical interpretation and authorial intention, as well as between social and historical “context” and authorial and aesthetic autonomy. We will examine how patterns of social exclusion — in this case, race — define the digitally-mediated literary field of the present. And we will ask how the rise of social media and online retail have altered ideas and institutions of authorship, audience, and literariness.

In a 2015 interview with David Simon (creator of The Wire) President Barak Obama offered that The Wire is, "one of the greatest -- not just television shows, but pieces of [American] art in the last couple of decades."  The Wire combines hyperrealism (from a-quasi anthropological capture of syntax and dialect that recalls the language of Langston Hughes and Zora Neal Hurston to a preference for actors who lived “the game” in Baltimore’s inner city) with the reinvention of fundamental American themes (from picaresque individualisms, to coming to terms with the illusory “American dream”, to a fundamental loss of faith in American institutions), and engages in a scathing expose of the shared dysfunction among the bureaucracies (police, courts, public schools etc.) that manage a troubled American inner city.  On a more macro level The Wire humanizes (and therefore vastly problematizes) assumptions about the individual Americans’ who inhabit America’s most dangerous urban environments from gang members to police officers to teachers and even ordinary citizens.

The Wire, of course, did not single-handedly reshape American television. Scholars like Martin Shuster refer to this period of television history as “new television.” That is, the product of new imaginations that felt television had exhausted its normative points of reference, subject matter and narrative technique. Many of the shows from this period sought to reinvent television for interaction with an evolving zeitgeist shaped by shared dissolution with 21st century American life: “I’d been thinking: it’s good to be in a thing from the ground floor, I came too late for that, I know.  But lately I’m getting the feeling I might be in at the end.  That the best is over,” Tony Soprano confides to Dr. Malfi in S1.E1 of the Sopranos.  Series that fall within this rubric include (in chronological order): The Sopranos; The Wire; Deadwood; Madmen; and Breaking Bad.

This course will examine British women writers including Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf in the context of the (long-) nineteenth-century "Woman Question". Our inquiry will engage the controversy over a woman’s status in terms of the social and political debates of early feminism as well as the enigma of “woman’s nature” in light of the rise of psychology and psychoanalysis in the period. We will consider how women writers negotiate these current social and psychological discourses in the stories they tell about themselves and others: how do they portray a woman’s life, especially as it manifests the tension George Eliot articulates between “inward impulse and outward fact”? We will pay attention to representations of gender, subjectivity, interiority, desire, domestic affections, friendship, education, economic and professional experience, faith, and creativity as reflecting the struggle, rising influence, and emergent identity of woman. In addition to novels, poetry, and drama, we will read excerpts of critical essays from among our primary authors and other prominent thinkers of the period, such as Wollstonecraft, Martineau, Taylor Mill, and Freud, who, by the early twentieth century, still famously puzzles: “What does a woman want?”

This course will offer an immersion in both the history and the language of comics, from the newspaper strips through the early comic books to today's graphic novels. Beginning with readings that offer a theoretical framework and an analytical vocabulary, students will examine and discuss the way page layout, panel composition, color, lettering, sound effects, and more help carry and shape the narrative, as soundtracks and shot composition do in film. Readings will include wordless works by Shaun Tan, classic works by Alison Bechdel, as well as many that may be less familiar. Students will analyze the American, Asian, and European approaches to comics. Guest speakers from the comics industry will aid in developing students' analytical skills. Instructor permission is required for registration after 5/28.

The nature of cinema as a technology, a business, a cultural product, an entertainment medium, and most especially an art form. Study of cinematic genres, stylistics, and nationalities; outstanding film artists and artisans; the relationship of cinema to other art forms and media, as well as to society.

Cinema and videogames are moving-image-based media, and, especially over the past two decades, they have been credited with influencing each other. But how deep do their similarities actually go? In what way do the possibilities available to game developers differ from those available to filmmakers? How does each medium segment and present space, time, and action? What aesthetic effects are open to games that are not open to cinema, and vice versa? This course offers a comprehensive exploration of the dynamic relationship between cinema and video games. Through a combination of film screenings, gameplay, theoretical reading/discussions, and practical assignments, students will examine the historical, cultural, aesthetic, and narrative connections between these two influential media forms. The course aims to foster an understanding of how cinema and video games intersect, inform, and influence one another, providing a unique perspective on storytelling techniques within these mediums. The course will culminate in a final presentation where students will adapt an existing intellectual property, preferably a film or TV show, into a video game (or vice versa), justifying their creative choices.

In 1933’s King Kong, the titular giant ape is brought to New York City in chains—he is brought to Broadway, becoming an object of spectacle for the gaping crowds. Film scholar James Snead describes the film as an “allegory of the slave trade… and of various other forms of exploitation and despoilment.” Snead finds in the monster movie gestures towards the fears of an emancipated Black America as represented by the Harlem Renaissance and even, with its climax at the very top of the Empire State Building, a critique of American Capitalism. How the scholar uncovers, in King Kong, anxieties about the city and the wider American experience, emblematizes the ‘against-the-grain’ approach of this class which asks: what kind of subterranean views of New York City and its taboo/unseen histories emerge when we look deep into the shadows of the horror genre?

Our eye will move across the city as well as across film and media history, plunging from the heights of King Kong’s looming skyscraper to Greenwich Village where murderers lurk among our neighbors (Rear Window). We will move from the macabre world of a cruel, sometimes demonic upper class (American Psycho, Rosemary’s Baby) to the gay cruising scene of the 1970s menaced by slashers who may be hiding in the dancing crowd (Cruising).

With its emphasis on field trips, the course will offer a holistic view of an iconic yet always changing city with visits to the top of the Empire State Building and to the Museum of Reclaimed Space. There, we will gain lessons on gentrification’s costs as well as strategies to resist its insidiously flattening force. For our week on Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, we will visit the setting of the Dakota Hotel, mulling how the film about a woman who may be giving birth to an otherworldly creature visualizes urban space as a place of profound disconnection. It will mobilize the archival resources of Columbia’s collections around the featured films, so students can appreciate how New York-based critics perceived these films’ representations of the city. To further frame how horror can be a space to explore unsung histories and the impacts of ongoing cultural traumas, acclaimed artists will be invited into the classroom. These include: Pornsak Pichetshote whose graphic novel Infidel presents the prejudices, paranoias, and fears of post-9/11 New York in a monstruous light along with Columbia’s own Victor LaValle whose horror-fantasy novel and streaming series, The Changeling, features the long-abandoned site of quarantine, North Brother Island. Grounded in Columbia’s and New York City’s resources, profoundly interdisciplinary, and punctuated by artist perspectives, the class will ultimately offer students tools to perform theoretically incisive research exploring how the horror genre unflinchingly faces the city’s and our culture’s most unsettling realities.