Courses

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.

This course explores the cultural contexts and aesthetic debates surrounding the Harlem or New Negro literary renaissance, 1920s to 1930s. Through fiction, poetry, essays, and artwork, we will consider the movement within the context of American modernism and African American cultural history, focusing on the relationship or tension between art/literature and socio-political change. Topics considered include: patronage, passing, primitivism, and the problematics of creating a “racial” art in/for a community comprised of differences in gender, class, sexuality, and geographical origin. We will work with the Alexander Gumby Collection of Negroiana at the Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library to think through the era's cultural history and the impact of different archival media on its historiography.

This class will focus on John Milton’s 1667 epic poem about the creation of the world and the fall of humanity; Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel about a scientist’s creation of life; and Toni Morrison’s 1997 novel about a small, rural, all-black town in Oklahoma. In addition to the explicit echoes between these books, each work is interested in the relationship between the natural world and human beings; gender difference, relations between the sexes, and the reproduction of human life; and the bases of, and threats to, an ideal society. By reading these three works of art in sequence, we will thus look at how authors engage similar issues in different ways, paying particular attention to the role of of history, nation, genre, politics, literary tradition, and authorial identity. Finally, we will consider the ways in which authors’ revising, refuting, and re-envisioning of “source” texts affects our readings of the “source” texts as much as the new.

“Learned we may be with another man's learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.”― Michel de Montaigne “There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.” Annie Dillard, The Writing Life “Find a subject you care about and which in your heart you feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.” Kurt Vonnegut What makes the essay of personal experience an essay rather than a journal entry? How can one's specific experience transcend the limits of narrative and transmit a deeper meaning to any reader? How can a writer transmit the wisdom gained from personal experience without lecturing her reader? In The Art of the Essay, we explore the answers to these questions by reading personal essays in a variety of different forms. We begin with Michel de Montaigne, the 16th-century philosopher who popularized the personal essay as we know it and famously asked, “What do I know?,” and follow the development of the form as a locus of rigorous self-examination, doubt, persuasion, and provocation. Through close reading of a range of essays from writers including Annie Dillard, Salman Rushdie, Jamaica Kincaid, and June Jordan, we analyze how voice, form, and evidence work together to create a world of meaning around an author's experience, one that invites readers into conversations that are at once deeply personal and universal in their consequences and implications.

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.

In this course (whose title is taken from the name of the final episode of The Sopranos) we focus on America’s three greatest practitioners of the so-called “Mafia Movie.” In the first half of the course we examine representations of Mafia in the films of Coppola and Scorsese; in the second half, we perform a comprehensive reading of The Sopranos, a serial that redefined not only the gangster genre, but the aesthetic possibilities of television itself. In addition to our close-readings of the primary cinematic texts, we will pay attention to literary, historical, and anthropological sources on Mafia, both in America and in Italy. In the unit on The Sopranos, we will also consider connections to other contemporary representations of American gangsterism, particularly in the medium of television. Critical avenues privileged will include gender, sexuality, criminal and political economy, poetics of place, internationalism, dialect, plurilingualism and the politics of language, ethnicity and race, diaspora, philosophies of violence, philosophies of power.

In The Super Mario Bros. Movie, plumes of dust fill the New York City streets as the monster Bowser attacks the city. Mario, seemingly beaten, hides in a pizzeria. What inspires him to keep fighting? He sees himself in a TV ad for his plumbing business, wearing a superhero cape and flying next to the Freedom Tower. He finds solace in the representation of himself as a superhero and in a city that refused to concede that the game was over after 9/11. Such a scene is emblematic of a seminar that will explore the superhero’s relationship to the city’s history and its traumas. Our eye will move between Hollywood blockbusters and global art cinema to help us mull how the superhero exemplifies, for some, the excesses of the U.S. during the global War on Terror. We will see Batman’s alter-ego Bruce Wayne run towards what looks like an imploding World Trade Center on 9/11 (Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice) and witness the superhero framed as an ideological smokescreen for the callous administration of George W. Bush who used the attacks to justify an endless war (The Broken Circle Breakdown).

While strongly focused on the post-9/11 superhero and its links to New York City, the cross-media seminar will track the superhero’s initial rise in popularity during the trauma of World War II. It will mobilize the archival resources of Columbia's Rare Book & Manuscript Library collections around the papers of noted X-Men writer Chris Claremont, so students can read how the artist conceived of bringing histories around the Holocaust into his spectacular stories. Such dips into the archives will help us assess how such empowered figures offer surprising routes of representation for the disenfranchised. We will also consider the authoritarian possibilities of the vigilante Batman, situating Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns against a cultural study that draws links between the comic and Bernhard Goetz who killed four black teenagers in a Manhattan subway in 1984. To further frame how the superhero serves as a potent means of socio-political critique, acclaimed artists and writers will be invited into the classroom. These include Paul Pope whose Batman: Year 100 (2006) presents a dystopian superhero that allegorizes the oppressive aspects of the War on Terror’s surveillance regime. A culminating field trip to the National September 11 Memorial Museum will be organized. There, students will visit “The World Trade Center in the Popular Imagination” exhibit which showcases the decades-long link between the superhero and the architectural marvel in popular culture. 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 on American pop culture that joyfully flies across boundaries.

This practical lab focuses on the fundamental aspects of development, planning and preparation for low budget films. While using a short film script as their own case study – students will learn pitching, development, script breakdown, scheduling, budgeting and fundraising. Discussion of legal issues, location scouting, deliverables, marketing, distribution and film festival strategy will allow students to move forward with their own projects after completing the class. Using weekly assignments, in-class presentations and textbook readings to reinforce each class discussion topic, students will complete the class having created a final prep/production binder for their project, which includes the script breakdown, production schedule, line item budget, financing/fundraising plan and film festival strategy for their chosen script.

Modern feature-length screenplays demand a specific architecture. In this class students will enter with an idea for a film, and during the first eight sessions build a coherent treatment; that is, a summary of the events and major emotional arcs of the film's three acts. In the final four sessions students will begin and complete the first act of their feature-length screenplay.

Tech Arts: Post Production delivers a practical introduction to the post production process, a vital part of filmmaking. The course will look at the process of moving efficiently from production to post production, the techniques of non-linear editing and ultimately the process of professionally finishing a film for modern distribution. Students will learn foundational post terminology, how to create the best workflow for your film, how to manage data/footage in the edit room, and offline and online editing. Additionally, the class will cover other key steps in the post production process including audio syncing, transcoding, exporting and mastering. The hands-on lessons and exercises will be conducted using the industry-standard Non-Linear Editing System, Davinci Resolve, and will serve as a primer for other professional systems, including Adobe Premiere and Davinci Resolve. Each lecture will consist of hands-on demonstrations and self-paced practice using content created by the students and/ or content provided by the program.

Documentaries are increasingly proliferating across small and large screens around the world. They circulate as market commodities, forms of entertainment, and vehicles for social change. In this seminar we will compare different national and regional contexts of contemporary documentary production, including projects created within the media industries of Mexico, Peru, India, China, Cambodia, and Israel. We will also examine how documentaries resonate locally, but can still transcend geographic borders and engage viewers across the globe. Crucial to our course will be the close analysis of how documentaries actively address civil rights struggles, oppressive government regimes, cultural trends, environmental crises, and progressive social movements to create more inclusive, equitable communities. So, too, will we examine emerging technologies (such as VR/AR), strategies of international co-production, star-studded film festivals, as well as the global reach and impact of mega studios such as Netflix and Wanda. This course fulfills the Global Core requirement.

Equivalent to FREN UN1101. Designed to help students understand, speak, read, and write French, and to recognize cultural features of French-speaking communities, now with the help of a newly digitized audio program. Students learn to provide information in French about their feelings, environment, families, and daily activities. Daily assignments, quizzes, laboratory work, and screening of video material.