This class serves as an introduction to reading and writing about literary texts and critical theory, with a concentration on composition, critical analysis, and research. Students are required to write essays based on the critical analysis of texts across a range of genres. Emphasis is placed on using writing as an extension of the thought and creative process, and as a tool that can be integrated across academic and artistic disciplines. There will be a focus on mastering the elements of the thesis-centered essay and developing research skills. Students must receive a grade of C or higher to have successfully passed this course.

This class serves as an introduction to literature, composition, critical analysis, and research for architecture students. Students are required to write essays based on the critical analysis of texts across a range of genres. Emphasis is placed on using writing as an extension of the thought process, and as a tool that can be integrated across academic and artistic disciplines. Stress is placed on mastering the elements of the thesis-centered essay and developing research skills. This course is open ONLY to Architecture students.

This is the first course in a two course sequence, HMS 101C and 201C. In HMS 101C we wll build reading and writing skils through the study of texts including literature, critcal theory, visual arts, and other artifacts. We will explore these texts through a partcular thematic focus and continue to work on critical, analytical, and creative thinking as well as academic writing and research skills required in the Core. The students will respond to reading through various modes. This course is intended for international students and other students who may benefit from English-langauge learning support. There is a specifc focus on developing English language skills.

This course enables registered Architecture students who have completed their first-semester Freshman English requirement to take an advanced writing-intensive class linked to their first-semester design studio. All first year students, regardless of status, will register in the following semester in HMS 201B.

While students continue to deepen and refine the critical thinking and writing skills required in 101A, emphasis is places on exploring literary and visual texts in historical and cultural contexts and in their myriad relations to critical theory. Students will also continue to develop and refine a writing style characterized by coherency, clarity of expression, analytical rigor, and personal style. The course will culminate in an independent research project that helps to point students toward their further focused studies. Students must receive a grade of C or higher to have successfully passed this course.

This introductory seminar is in correspondence with your architectural design studio and is intended to help you challenge and develop your ideas about the relationship between space, the body and the built environment, as well as to give your practice in both articulating these ideas and relating them to the context, syntax and intention of your architectural investigations in the studio. In this seminar, as a way of building on the work you did in HMS 101B, we'll broaden the understanding of the form of language your developed in that class by engaging with a variety of texts to help you examine the content of language out it the world and its place in architecture. We will begin by developing distinctions between the notion of language and culture and explore the understanding that language is performative, produced through representation, perception and experience of the material environment, and mediated through many different forces (cultural, symbolic, social). The emphasis of the second semester course is on post colonial theory and critical race theory. As a way to feed these explorations, we will study texts from a range of fields such as literature, film, criticism, science, philosophy, architecture, and cultural theory, and then create a conversation between these texts and your own ideas through a variety of writing challenges. The pace of the seminar allows for greater reflexivity and thoughtful construction of ideas that are presented in the studio. In many ways, the literary and critical studies seminar is the nodal point for all of the other courses in the architecture program; it is in the seminar that you will learn to practice reflexivity through speaking, performance and writing. We will divide our work into three units, each of which requires you to focus on a different medium and a different type of academic writing; as the final project of each unit, you will produce a written essay that engages with both a primary text (such as a novel, a film, a work of architecture or your own final project in the architectural design studio) and the theoretical/critical; texts and concepts we have discussed during the semester. In each unit, you will first complete a series of pre-draft assignments form which you will develop (and substantially revise) an essay; for the research assignment of the course, you will produce a ten-page essay. At the end of the term you will turn in a complete portfolio with all of the essays you have produced this semester, and a reflection on the revisions of the essays.

This is the second course in a two-course sequence, HMS 101C and 201C. In HMS 201C we will continue to build academic and critical reading and writing skills through work with literar, critical, through the stUdy of a variety oftexts including but not limited to, literature, non-fiction, visual texts,film, music, visual art and digital content. We will explore literature and critical theory with a particular thematic focus and continue to work on critical, analytical, and creative thinking as well as academic writing and research skills required in the Core. The students will respond to readings through various expository and interpretive modes. This course is intended for international students and other students who may benefit from English-language learning support. There is a specific focus on developing English language skills.

This course investigates major literary works of mythology, epic poetry, drama, fable and religious poetry from around the world, extending from the Mesopotamian period to the early 17th Century. These works are examined within their specific literary and historical contexts.

This course investigates major literary works of poetry, prose and drama from around the world from the 17th Century to the present. These works are examined within their specific literary and historical contexts.

Important novels from African, Asian, and Latin American cultures introduce vivid lives, moral issues and aesthetic values which differ from those in the Euro-American tradition but which show common passions and problems. Films, guest speakers, and field trips enlarge cultural perspectives. Writing encourages comparative research and personal involvement.

In this interdisciplinary course, students read, view, and listen to a range of material-essays, poetry, art, films-related to the politics and culture of African American people. For the purpose of contextualizing African American aesthetics, as expressed in fine art, outsider art, music, and dance, we will examine central themes in U.S. black history, including slavery, urban migration, segregation, oppression, and ongoing struggles for freedom.

Survey of African-American Culture explores the art generated by women and men of African descent in the United States and the Caribbean. We will explore archetypes and stereotypes, themes of flight and return, of assimilation and resistance and seek to uncover the meaning and substance of voices resisting silence.

Since the term \"Middle Ages\" is burdened with designating one thousand years of history (c.500-1500), this course will provide a necessarily limited overview of a few major literary, philosophical, religious, and aesthetic issues that defined the period in Western Europe. Literary and philosophical texts will be situated within the historic, aesthetic, social, and intellectual contexts in which they emerged in order to provide a sense of the specific trends that characterized shorter periods within the medieval era. The trends to be studied will vary each semester the course is taught.

This course provides an overview of the roots of modern Western culture and its global engagements. The goal is to provide the student with a grasp of the range of historical, philosophical, and literary issues raised by early modern texts and images produced prior to 1700. It aims to move the student towards an appreciation of the alterity of this period, and thus of the contingency of ways of thinking and creating that we take for granted in the modern era.

Students learn effective business communication. The use of professional language and the principles of organization are stressed in the resume, cover letter, proposal, letter of refusal, memo, presentation and research report and other documents. The course also includes a focus on the electronic workplace and professional communication norms related to the workplace.

This course enables registered Architecture students who have completed 220B and who have credit for their second-semester Freshman English requirement to take an advanced writing-intensive class linked to their second-semester design studio.

This course teaches basic techniques of journalism, including research, interviewing, fact-checking and ethics-all in the context of readings in the history of journalism and under the guidance of an experienced professional. Students research and write basic news stories and profiles and generate story ideas, with encouragement to pursue suitable outlets for publication. Classroom instruction and writing assignments are supplemented with field trips and guest lectures from professional journalists. The course is a preferred elective for Writing Program students.

This class will provide a hands-on introduction to newspaper and magazine reporting, with a focus on writing a wide array of feature articles-among them news features, profiles, reviews and human interest pieces.

The status of literature - its meaning, structure, truth value, and social function - has proven, throughout history, to be surprisingly controversial, and has generated endless commentary. This class provides a survey of the field of literary criticism and theory from Antiquity to the present. Texts are drawn from a range of theoretical schools or movements, including formalism, structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism and gender studies, sexuality studies, deconstruction, and post-structuralism. While the course focuses on literary criticism, connections are also made to art criticism and intellectual history.

This introductory, nonsectarian course includes extensive readings from a modern English translation of the New Testament; plus a supplementary text, media presentations, lecture-discussions, and a field trip. We explore contributions from many disciplines that relate to biblical scholarship (e.g., history, archeology, linguistics) in order to more fully understand the texts in their original cultural settings. Students do additional research (e.g., on art influenced by the New Testament, on controversies rooted in the New Testament, etc.), write papers, and present their findings in class.

Take a general introduction to the issues of horror, monstrosity, and the abject in literature, film, and theory.

This course is an introduction to the history, analytic concepts, and critical vocabulary necessary for understanding cinema as a major cultural form of the 20th century. You will be invited to see cinema as a dynamic and international art form that has evolved in response to its own history, that of the other arts, and wider historical, political, technological, and economic contexts. The goal of this class is to serve as an introduction both to film history and to how to think, write, and talk about films as media of cultural praxis.

This course is an introduction to effective public speaking as well as effective communication in small groups. All students will develop, organize, and deliver several types of speeches; study in workshop form the dynamics of various interpersonal communication situations, such as conflict management, job interviews, body language, and cross-cultural exchanges; and improve critiquing and listening skills. Students will complete research papers and lead mini-workshops about further aspects of interpersonal communication.

This class enables students to develop fundamental acting skills including voice, movement, expression, imagination, character development, trust and relaxation.

This course is an introduction to sound across the arts. Students will encounter works created in the fields of experimental music, sound art, sound installation, film sound, and audio literature. We will discuss the project, techniques, theories, and other intersections between and among the creative contexts for artists working in the medium of sound.

This one-credit writing workshop provides an introduction to language formation across the disciplines. By adapting principles from the philosophy of language, students will learn to locate a material language that corresponds with their making process at one within and beyond the discipline of architecture. In weekly assignments, students will develop new forms of language making, text-image and performance practices in relationship to a studio project.

This one-credit writing course provides an introduction to language formations across the disciplines. Expanding the curriculum of HMS 291B, this course enables students to develop a material language in negotiation with the social and political dimensions of their mediation processes and representational logics into a public, performance dimension. For a final assignment, students will assemble a text-image based project that locates their project in a social and political context.

A (selective) survey of 300 years of books written for children, with particular emphasis on the idea of childhood as implicit in the texts and (sometimes) explicit in the illustrations. Students may approach the course as critics or as (potential) creators - i.e. writers/illustrators.

This course investigates how works of the 20th Century literary sub-genres of science, western, romance, horror and detective fiction reflect in their familiar stylistic conventions popular national myths, gender stereotypes and other prevailing social and political perspectives.

Students study satire, a literary mode that blends social criticism with humor and wit to the end that human institutions or humanity may be improved. The range of readings is from Aristophanes' Lysistrata and Petronius' The Satyricon, to contemporary fiction and works such as Maus.

This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in literary studies in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

This course will serve as a general introduction to the various literatures and literary cultures which came about due to the massive cultural dislocations of the early twentieth century. Topics may include: theories of modernism and modernity, stream of consciousness, literary montage, fragmentation, alienation, literary expressionism, Harlem Renaissance, queer modernisms, etc. Authors may include: Oscar Wilde, Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Robert Musil, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Wyndham Lewis, Samuel Beckett, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, etc.

This course examines a sampling of works by modernist playwrights such as Ibsen, Shaw, Brecht, Chekhov, O'Neill and Beckett to explore how contemporary drama has been and continues to be informed by the ideas of these 19th and 20th Century innovators of the theater. A term paper is required.

This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in modern and contemporary literary and cultural studies in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

This interdisciplinary course is about the art, politics, and social and cultural formations of people of African descent. The focus is transnational, encompassing the black Diasporan world. Students read, view and listen to an exciting range of material-essays, poetry, documentaries, films and music. Students consider slavery, colonialism, and continued forms of oppression and exploitation as well as the long history of liberation movements, including slave revolts, protest and resistance movements, independence movements and revolutions. They also consider the history of black feminism, black queer liberation, and black labor struggles. We will read from personal stories of escape, fugitivity, dislocation, migration, and exile, as movement is the key trope of Diaspora. Students will also learn about other central cultural tropes and aesthetic philosophies within black culture, including the trope of transformation and the use of alternative cosmologies. The course asks about the various strategies of resistance black people develop and why. We will think about approaches to change, including pacifism, non-violent direct action, and armed resistance. We will be aware of the masculinist tendencies in black history, as we consider the presence of black women and alternatively gendered black peoples, of feminists and queer activists, as well as the ways doing so makes us rethink what we know about black history, culture, and politics. Reading and watching and listening to African and Caribbean art, literature, students will learn about the central cultural formations, particularly the importance of the expressive arts.

This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in world literary and cultural studies in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

This course examines a selection of works, mainly fiction and nonfiction, from the 17th century to the present, which raise interesting questions about American identities and histories, and about narrative and genre.

This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in American studies in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

From an outsider perspective, the non-Deaf community tends to define deafness by the absence of hearing. Broadening our view to include how members of the Deaf community view their experiences, we will familiarize ourselves with disability theory in order to enter a discourse about what role our societal perspectives play in negotiating the line between disability and culture. Based on our understanding of the subjective nature of disability and considering deafness as a culture having departed from disabled origins, we will explore the ways in which Deaf artists, writers, filmmakers, comedians and architects have contributed to mainstream culture and the role their cultural identity plays in their works. We will read academic texts on disability theory, explorative works on deafness, first hand accounts of the Deaf experience as well as observe the cross-genre intertextuality of Deaf expression.

In this course, students will read a breadth of contemporary literature written for teens, stretching across genres and forms including fiction, speculative fiction, memoir, poetry, graphic novels, and journals, with a few historical antecedents. As we investigate the ways teen identity is both reflected in and shaped by these works, we will consider topics of education, family, community, religion, gender and sexuality, violence and justice, censorship and book bans, immigration and home, utopias and dystopias, and works that cross-over with adult readerships. Written assignments and creative projects will provide students with the opportunity to further investigate topics of most interest to them, while critically and creatively reflecting on their own reading experiences as young adults.

This course examines representative Shakespearean plays as works of dramatic art and as reflections of Renaissance culture. A term paper is required.

Many of the dominant paradigms of modern Western Culture emerged during the Romantic Period in Britain and Europe (during the late 18th and early 19th century). This course uses the study of Romanticism-- especially though its literatures-- as a way of getting some perspective on these paradigms, which continue to shape the way we think.

This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in European literary studies in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in poetry and poetics in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

This course will investigate forms of detective fiction- and discourses of mystery and crime more broadly-in literature, cinema and other media. We will rethink their development form the post-Enlightenment urbanization of the gothic in the nineteenth century to the rose of whodunit mysteries and hard-boiled crime fiction in the twentieth century (including connections to other genres like the psychological thriller, western and science fiction), as well as film noir, neo-noir, and more experimental, postmodern and contemporary examples form across nations and cultures. Our critical and theoretical inquiries will consider how stories of criminal transgression and forensic fact-finding relate to historical transformations of subjectivity and society, and how they pose challenging questions about truth, justice and power that persist to this day.

Science fiction disorients us, unsettling our common sense notions of selfhood, nature, and progress; it can destabilize what we think we know about being human and about life itself. This course examines science fiction literature, film, and other media through the rubric of science studies, with three overlapping areas of exploraton: biology, technology, and broader planetary ecologies. Though the focus of the course will be fiction, film, and media, we will use theories coming out of science studies and science fiction studies to analyze the course materials.

This section of Creative Writing introduces students to poetry writing as process and practice. Students will explore imaginative composition through directed exercises in writing poetry and poetic prose. These exercises will be supported by the close reading and analysis of short works by a variety of authors. Completed exercises will be presented to classmates for constructive comment.

Students will explore the imaginative composition of fiction through regular creative writing assignments and analysis of passages from selected authors.

This course continues Screenwriting I in further developing the use of setting, location, narrative structure, conflict, character development and dialogue. In the first half of the course, students write short scenes. In the second half, they work on scripts for a 10-15 minute film.

This course introduces students to the fundamental techniques of screenwriting. Topics covered include formatting, setting, location, narrative structure, conflict, character development and dialogue. In the first half of the course, students write their own short scenes. In the second half, they develop and expand those scenes into a script for a 10-15 minute short film.

This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in creative writing in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

This course examines the ways critics have applied psychoanalytic theory to the study of film and the moving image. Starting with early cinema and the work of classic psychoanalytic theorists including Freud and Klein, the course will move to more contemporary films, as well as more contemporary theorists, including feminist, queer, and anti-racist theorists who use psychoanalytic methods. In the process, students will learn how to read films as social symptoms of the culture and time-period in which they were produced.

Explore what it means to be a professional journalist in NYC. Develop reporting skills. Focus on news and/or feature writing. You will conduct interviews, attend public events and hearings, and write investigative and human interest articles.

This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in journalism in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

This course covers works by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, and the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who reread Freud through the lens of developing twentieth-century philosophy and structural linguistics. Also examined will be the works of other thinkers, writers, artists and filmmakers that exemplify and/or engage psychoanalytical ideas.

In this class, we will read primarily theoretical writings about Postmodernism and think and write creatively in response to them, considering how they speak to our lives as well as providing resources for our practices as artists, writers, designers. Practices and concepts may include sampling, queering, networks, fractals, emergence and open systems, sustainability, deconstruction, radical plurality, hybridity, irony, kitsch, simulacra, the virtual, and so on. Our focus will be on HOW TO DO THINGS with theory.

This course will examine theories of thought, the brain and mind from ancient philosophy to contemporary cognitive neuroscience. Topics may include: self-reflection, recursion, creativity, intuition, rationalism/empiricism, psychoanalysis, neuroanatomy, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, etc. No prior experience in philosophy, computer science or biology is required - just bring yourself and an open mind.

This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in literary and cultural theory in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

This course will introduce students to ideas in performance studies, and the study of games, gaming, simulations, and virtual reality. Topics may include: ritual, performance, performativity theory, classical game theory, evolutionary game theory, video games and video game studies, screen studies and interfaces, virtual reality, simulation software and cellular automata (ie: Netlogo, 'Game of Life'), etc. No prior knowledge is required, nor any experience with computers.

This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in cultural studies in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in gender studies in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

A cross-disciplinary course that examines how we come to understand who we are as a species by considering who we might have been in the distant past. How has our history come to be written? Who are our ancestor species? And what criteria do anthropologists and archeologists use to determine what the essential characteristics are that make a species Human? Our topics include Paleolithic art, social organization in prehistoric times, human migration, and genetics as contributors to the emergence of a human consciousness. Central to our investigations are discussions of race, gender, Indigeneity, and the rise of patriarchy. Students are introduced to old and emerging theories in anthropology and archeology as well as contributions made by Indigenous scientists who bring community-based methodologies to concepts of prehistory and origin. Students will conduct research, respond to ideas that emerge from the material, and create works related to course topics in the three presentations assigned during the semester.

This course explores analytic approaches to the mythic resonance of selected films, emphasizing classic motifs such as the Hero Quest, Origins, and Death and Rebirth, as well as myths of everyday living. Screenings are preceded by commentary on background information and followed by interpretations of the mythic and cinematographic contributions to the achievement of the films.

During cinema's early years there was much debate as to whether film was an entirely new art form, or an art at all. Now, at the dawn of cinema's second century, this course examines the relationship between film, emerging forms of new and digital media, and other aspects of cultural production.

This course introduces students to the history, theory, and practice of making documentary images in photography and video. In addition to reading/viewing visual/critical works and writing short critical and evaluative essays, students will learn to use the basic photo/video tools in Apple's iPhoto and iMovie applications to produce individual and group photo-essay and digital video shorts, and then assemble these with iWeb to display on their own websites. Class time will be split between these academic and 'praxis' components.

This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in cinema and media studies in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

This course is designed to enable students in Copenhagen to explore special topics in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

This screening class will present a historical survey of the major trends in Japanese cinema from the post-war period to the early 1980s. We will study and view classic works by such acknowledged masters of world cinema as Kurosawa, Ozu, and Mizoguchi, but also groundbreaking films by lesser known directors.

This course is designed to enable students in Copenhagen to explore special topics in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in European cinema and media in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

This course is designed to enable students in Copenhagen to explore special topics in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

In this class we will combine practical skills with a study of the historical and theoretical issues involved in the evolving new circus movement. Practical skills include, juggling, slack rope walking, object puppetry, basic partner acrobatics, and clowning. We will explore performance styles ranging from Judson influenced improvisation to clown schtick and the grand circus Ta-Da. We will look at traditional circus history, history of the sideshow, pageantry, political theater, writings on freaks and otherness, contemporary performance art, and clowning. We will also collaborate on an end-of-semester show.

This class explores the art, the play, the technique and the rigorous fun involved in bringing a strong presence to the unique space of performing. The class begins with a focus on physical and vocal training, moving through improvisation, generation material, and working with prepared material. Time and timing, space, tenderness, chaos, intention, perception, lying, and the imaginary are examples of the kinds of ideas we might use as tools to move us into exploratory spaces. This class is required for the Performance and Performance Studies minor but open to non-minors as well.

In this course, students will learn the fundamental concepts, terms, and theories in the field of performance studies. Students will learn how to use these frameworks to understand traditional performance arts as well as gain unique perspectives on their own major fields, on other art/design practices, and on everyday life, by learning to see the world performatively. This class is required for the Performance and Performance Studies Minor but open to non-minors as well.

This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in performance and performance studies in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

What is a poem? Who is a poet? What are the limits of the poem? In this course we will look and listen for poems and the poetic across a variety of contexts. Among our poetic texts will be works publishes as poems in different media (ie: print, audio, internet, & video) and works typically presented as representative of other art forms (such as sculpture, painting, music, video art, conceptual art, net art, and dance). We will discuss these works in the context of poetry criticism and media theory.

This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in music and sound studies in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

This course is a concentrated introduction to the materials and forms of music. Music is a language. Students will learn to analyze it, write about it and write it. The course aims to demystify music, and particularly music composition, so that students will be empowered as participants in it. Students with no musical training are welcome but should be aware that this is an intensive course that includes the fundamentals of reading music.

This course examines authors responding to the major social, cultural, and spiritual upheavals of the twentieth century with humor, ranging from exuberant release to mocking despair. Representative writers such as Celine, West, Miller, Beckett, Heller, Vonnegut, and Pynchon are examined for their use of mordant irony and sense of the absurd.

This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in literary studies in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

This course explores the way intertwined concepts of race, gender, and sexuality are produced and contested through live performance, film, video, recording, and various internet incarna(ons. The circula(on of images, ideas, memes, music, and iconography will be examined in historical perspec(ve. These media will be considered not only as forma(ons through which dominant cultures reinforce oppressive systems and structures of feeling, but also as forma(ons through which racialized, gendered, and sexualized subjects contest these ideas.

This course offers an overview of the political economy of labor in the contemporary fashion industry. We trace the roots and routes of fashion's global commodity chains emphasizing especially their cultural and economic contours. In other words, this course focuses on the structural factors that condition global fashion production and consumption. These include but are not limited to trade and labor policies, capitalism's racial and colonial logics, and the global scale of gender oppression. While issues of social representation are no doubt important in relation to fashion, they're not the concerns of this course. This semester, we will approach fashion not as tools for making and performing identity but as a system of unequal institutional arrangements of labor, trade, and rights that are designed to produce highly asymmetrical social, economic, and environmental outcomes.

This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in world literature and culture in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

This course looks at the first great age of American literature as it coincided with the country's greatest social upheaval, the Civil War. Representative authors will be examined as they express the intellectual contradictions of their times, from the most expansive social and metaphysical optimism to the darkest skepticism.

This course will introduce students to the field known as American Studies and its particular approach to representations of immigration, diaspora, and citizenship in American literature and culture.

This interdisciplinary course will focus on visual and literary representations of American girls that appeared during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We shall also examine feminist work on how this imagery helped shape a range of gender and other social perspectives.

This course will investigate the impact photography has had on American literature and culture. Examining a variety of literary, visual, and cultural texts from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present, we will focus on the role photography has played in the construction of race, gender and contestations over American citizenship.

This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in American studies in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

This course explores the historical, cultural and literary roots of the early twentieth-century Harlem Renaissance. Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright and music/film of the era will be examined and discussed.

This course is designed to enable students to explore particular special topics in African American literature and culture in a seminar setting. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

This course focuses on key poets of the early 20th Century instrumental in setting the course for modern poetry, and who continue to influence contemporary poetry. Students read essays and poetry by Stéphan Mallarmé, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, Mina Loy, HD and André Breton and will consider the question: What makes a poem modern? Features of modern poetry will be explored in the work of such post-WWII poets as Frank O'Hara and Harryette Mullen. Students will hand in short weekly responses and one longer essay.

This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in poetry and poetics in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in creative writing in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

This course covers foundational texts of critical theory from the nineteenth century (Marx, Freud, Nietzsche), landmarks of the twentieth century (Foucault, Deleuze, Butler, Jameson, Anzaldua, Debray, Kelley), a novel, and selected critical essays.

Rhizomatics is a way of thinking, creating, and living described in the writings of Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard, DeLanda and Badiou. Through readings of selected works of philosophy by these writers-- on art, politics, ethics, everyday life, desire and sex, biology, music, animal behavior, film, painting, etc-- we will work to understand what it might mean to exist in a state of constant, multi-level becoming. We will also look at works of art, politics, music and media created in response to these often highly experimental writings. No prior experience necessary.

This course examines the relationship between psychoanalysis and art from different perspectives, including the centrality of art and language to the development of psychoanalytic theory and the integration of psychoanalytic theory into the cultural critique of art, literature, and cinema. The course will provide an introduction not only to major psychoanalytic theories, including those of Freud, Jung, and Lacan, but will demonstrate the myriad and complex ways psychoanalysis has become inextricable from contemporary art criticism and theory.

This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in literary and cultural theory in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

This course examines literature, art, music, and architecture associated with modernism and postmodernism, along with their philosophical backgrounds. Topics covered include the aesthetic response to the rise of capitalism, differences between modernism and postmodernism, and concepts typically associated with postmodernism, including commodification, globalization, simulacra, pastiche, schizophrenia, paranoia, the decline of historical consciousness, challenges to the universal subject, and time-space compression. Authors covered may include Nietzsche, Proust, Kafka, Mann, Joyce, Woolf, Pynchon, Borges, and Morrison.

This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in cultural studies in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

This course explores a variety of films alongside some of the classic works of Western feminist film theory, as well as transnational and contemporary feminist writing on film, video, digital media and geo-politics.

This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in gender studies in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in postcolonial studies in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

This course will introduce students to various ways of analyzing representations of race. In particular, we will examine the construction of whiteness in U.S. culture by looking at literary, visual, theoretical, and legal texts from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century.

What is a stereotype? What is an archetype? Are all raced types stereotypes? This course explores several approaches to reading types in narratives of different contexts, our study will focus on representations of blackness produces in the US American context. We will read scholarly articles on the nature of stereotype, read essays on narrative conventions and the creative process, and screen creative works that both present and explode stereotypes.

This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in critical race studies in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

How do our real lives compare to our stories about real lives? This course explores narrative conventions for telling true stories in film. We will investigate differences in approach according to who is presenting the narrative and what the audience is expected to know about the subject. We will identify forms, sounds, and images associated with true stories and trace them across biopics, documentaries, and historical dramas.

This course will study the relationship between the rise of the modern city and the development of photography and cinema. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine the development of the cinema without the city, and cities themselves have been shaped by cinematic form. What is the relation between cityscape and screenspace? How has the modern city been represented in cinema?

This course explores the transformation of society and consciousness by and as media technologies during the long 20th century; students will read some of the most influential works of media analysis written during the past century as well as explore cutting edge analysis generated during the last 20 years.

This course investigates relationships between image and narrative in cinema. Weekly creative assignments-- informed by close readings of film excerpts and text-- will culminate in the design of a short, poetic film project. We will view visionary work by innovative filmmakers, and engage in close reading, followed by active discussion, to deepen our understanding of artistic choices-- in the use of metaphor, point of view, association, montage, image/action, frame, composition, time, space, kinetics, transformation, multiple perspectives, reflexivity, gesture and the body, non-linear narrative, amongst others-- in the act of visual storytelling central to the cinematic enterprise.

This course considers the vision of prominent and pioneering films, with particular attention to the gaze, subjectivity, ambivalence, multiplicity of perspective, identification and disruption, as cinematic vocabulary and subject. We will look at films-- in the works of artists such as Agnes Varda, Lois Weber, Claire Denis, Marguerite Duras and Alain Renais, Julie Taymor, Susanna Bier, Rainer Fassbinder, Wong Kar Wai, Ang Lee and Todd Haynes-- with an emphasis on identity, sexuality and gender.

Is film a visual medium? This course explores some of the theoretical concerns in designing the sound of a film, including the creation of soundtracks, the use of original scoring, and voiceovers.

Net Art is an interdisciplinary field roots in a number of other practices--conceptual art, performance art, video art, video games, poetry, and mail art, to name a few. We will study works of art on the internet and the practices of making and presenting art that precede them. Alongside works of art and art criticism, we will read works about the nature of the internet as a medium. Key concepts include: transmission, narration/narrative, presence, interactivity, identity, instrument, gaming, digital vs. analog, medium and mediation.

This course provides an intensive introduction to film theory and philosophy, contextualized in relation to movements in international film history. Topics are likely to include approaches to the cinematic apparatus, montage and mise-en-scene, gaze and spectatorship theory, and approaches drawn from media studies, sound studies, psychoanalysis, semiotics, feminist, queer, and post-colonial studies. The course is required for the Cinema Studies minor but is open to non-minors as well.

This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in cinema and media studies in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

In iconic films selected from contemporary global cinema, we will examine how the invention of new cinematic language is used to evoke poignant insight into human experience, and potentially influence our perceptions of reality. Modules organized by genre will consist of screenings, supplemented by guest filmmaker(s), seminar discussions, readings, research and student creative projects.

This course explores the rich and varied aesthetic and cultural traditions associated with Chinese-language cinema. It offers students the opportunity to view and analyze films from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and throughout the Chinese-speaking world using materials in both Chinese and English. No prior knowledge of Chinese is required.

An in-depth look at the history, regions, and social contexts of Latin American cinema via key women, queer, and trans filmmakers and screenwriters and the analysis of female, femme, and masc representations. Students learn about films and their contexts as well as about key theories of gender and sexualities applied to film studies and film analysis. The course includes materials that can be accessed in Spanish or English, and thus gives students with advanced or mid-level knowledge of Spanish the opportunity to practice. No prior knowledge of Spanish is required to complete the course.

Today, everyone has a \"hot take\"-a piece of opinion writing or op-ed that responds quickly to the latest political, cultural, or social event. A hot take competes for public attention in a 24-hour news cycle where journalists, bloggers, and other commentators (amateur and professional) are vying for the public's increasingly divided attention. Because of this, \"hot takes\" are often disparaged (sometimes deservedly) for substituting a personal opinion and shallow moralizing for thoughful, deliberate criticism. This course focuses on \"the cool take\"-commentary that is timely but not hastily produced, a strong individual perspective based on research, data, and revision. In this course, students will learn to identify what consitutes compelling cultural criticism, and employ those same standards while producing their own essays-a piece of writing that puts an exhibition, concert, television episode/series, theatrical produc(on, fashion collection, food trend, or some other cultural production in greater historical, social, political, and/or cultural context.

This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in performance and performance studies in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

As the Internet and social media pervade our daily lives and social relationships, it is crucial that we understand what norms and value are embedded within the technologies we engage with every day. This course understands the Internet as something more than just a means with which to communicate and share information. As students will learn, it is as much a technological form as it is a set of social, cultural, economic, and technological relationships. In this course, we will examine how race, gender, and difference more broadly are embedded in the design, operations, and accessibility of the Internet.

\"Postcoloniality\" marks a temporal and epistemic shift from colonization, while stressing that colonial wounds continue to vibrate across time and geographies. In this course, we look at how art (film, dramatic texts, performance, and visual art), analyzed through the lens of post-colonial theory, allows us to understand the legacies of colonialism and the sites of exclusion and exploitation created by global capital today. The artists and scholars we will encounter this semester work in the postcolonial contexts of Asian, African, Latin-American, and Caribbean nations. Towards the end of the semester, we engage related fields of decolonial studies, Indigenous resurgence, and radical Black Studies. This is a praxis-based course. As such, assignments will include creative and artistic as well as analytical responses to course material.

Copyright laws intend to protect \"original works of authorship\". But what counts as an original work of authorship and who counts as an authorial subject, as this course will show, are culturally and socially constructed determinations based on dominant norms, assumptions, and values. As a result, the history of copyright is a history of unequal social relations and cultural exchanges. This course investigates this history as well as the ongoing struggles by those excluded or marginalized from copyright law's purview to protect their cultural productions, practices, and knowledge's.

This course examines how a wide range of technologies form early film lighting technologies to cosmetics to algorithms shape the ways bodies are visualized and represented. The focus on the intertwined relationships of bodies and visual technologies will enable students to understand the social, cultural, and political implications of technological designs and operations.

Three credit Humanities course at DIS for Undergraduate students. The visual journal is a process-driven, analytical tool where you record drawn inquiries for this course, as well as for studio, study tours, and self-driven studies. The focus of this course is for you to develop skills on facilitating better explorations and understandings of what you perceive: observing, analyzing, and communicating the diverse human conditions and possibilities of the impact the physical environments and objects has on human behavior. This course will focus on contextual, climatic, historical, social and regulatory dimensions of local cultural aesthetic.

Electro-Acoustic Music acquaints students with the history of electronics in music/audio art, gives them a measure of technical competence with current tools in analog and digital audio and presents exercises that promote original, creative work. Familiarity with Macintosh computers and their operating systems is required for this course. Formal music training is not a prerequisite, but experience playing an instrument and/or a strong desire to create original audio works will be very helpful.

This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in music and sound studies in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.

This course develops critical frameworks for interpreting and creating artists' books; that is, artworks in which the book is a medium. We will study such books alongside histories of the field, theoretical writings, and critical commentaries. These studies will inform our endeavors to create, catalogue, and/or critique artists' books in which visual, verbal, and material elements are interwoven. Advanced students from various fields are encouraged to use and expand their own disciplinary perspectives. Visits to collections around New York City will supplement Pratt's resources.

Animating Narrative focuses on the fundamentals of storytelling and how to employ strong narrative elements in visual work, with an emphasis on animation and film. As a starting point, the course examines traditional stories and their underlying structures, looking closely at ancient mythologies from various world cultures and the common narrative elements they share, while comparing the visual representations that correspond to these elements. The course advances to less traditional narrative structures (I.e. nonlinear, antiheroic, sensory based, etc.) and the more complex and often abstract, largely nonfigurative or color schematic based visual representations some of these structures have evoked.

Human language use is an inherently ecological practice in that it participates in forming the way we think, write, and act In regards to the world we share with other living things. As such, language can be used as a force for imagining and establishing new ways of living together, but it must also be scrutinized for the ways in which our past and present linguistic concepts and strategies have contributed to a history of unsustainable attitudes and practices. In this course, we will read across a broad spectrum of poetry, philosophy, and history- as well as looking at a number of works in other media (film, video, image, and earthworks)- in order to contextualize contemporary ecolinguistic practices. We will also write: In the spirit of experiment and serious play, our poems and essays will test some of the ideas, concepts and orientations we discover along the way.

This course explores ways in which writing can recreate and investigate modes of photography. Writing and photography are at a point of potential interchangeability, where both are tools for utilitarian communication and poetic forms. Writing as Photography will enact the historic and contemporary overlap between the two mediums with seminar discussions on readings and workshops on writing exercises in poetry, prose, and criticism.

In this conceptual art-and-writing course, students will design, carry out, and document a \"cultural expedition\" designed to recuperate cultural lineages, dimensions of experience, and kinds of knowledge that are at risk of being lost. We will explore how poetics can expand our notions of sustainability to include cultural recovery and reanimation and we will learn to use specific writing and investigative (action-based) procedures, such as sustained looking practices, not-taking and commonplace books, audio recording and transcription, archive assembly and investigation, and site-specific research and performance. Be ready to step out of the classroom and into a more flexible, open, and versatile way of looking at writing, at the past, and at how we can, out of that past, construct a more diverse and desired world.

This course is a one-credit writing workshop designed to support artistic and design practice and provide students with creative approaches to meet writing required of them in school and more generally. Students will read and write about visual art, design, dance, money, news and politics, science, poetry. They will also write first person essays and collaborative texts about their own practice of making. Students will complete weekly assignments and cooperatively review work in class. Students will be given the opportunity to publish their work on a class blog or print anthology. For a final assignment, students will prepare a writing portfolio and present a revised artists statement.

This one-credit writing workshop provides an advanced course in transdisciplinary writing as a critical practice in an authorship-collective, dispersed and individual. Continuing the curriculum of HMS 292B in language formation across the disciplines, this course enables students to interpret and stake the critical position as an individual/collective expression. Individual sections may be cross linked and integrated with a section of fourth year Option studio.

This one credit-writing course provides an introduction to language formations across the disciplines. Expanding the curriculum of HMS 291B, this course enables student to develop a material language in negotiation with the social and political dimensions of their mediation processes and representational logics into a public, performance dimension. For a final assignment, students will assemble a text-image based project in a social and political context.

This one credit course provides a capstone in language formations across the disciplines. By adapting principles form the philosophy of language, students will learn to locate a material language that corresponds with their studio design project at once within and beyond the discipline of architecture. In weekly assignments, students will learn through a dedicated writing practice to present their final project as a concept that is derived from a body of research.

Media Studies Encounters 2, offered during Spring Semester, gives students a program of events, including speakers, films, presentations, performances, outings, and various other activities designed to introduce a widely varied set of media practices and theories in an informal setting. Discussions will also be held during weeks in which events are not scheduled. Some ongoing writing is required, but because the course is only for one credit, it will only meet for eight sessions at various points throughout the semester.

Copyright laws intend to protect \"original works of authorship\". But what counts as an original work of authorship and who counts as an authorial subject, as this course will show, are culturally and socially constructed determinations based on dominant norms, assumptions, and values. As a result, the history of copyright is a history of unequal social relations and cultural exchanges. This course investigates this history as well as the ongoing struggles by those excluded or marginalized from copyright law's purview to protect their cultural productions, practices, and knowledge's.