A course on the intellectual, cultural, historical, and social backgrounds to American literature. Topics will vary from semester to semester.

This course will consider a series of fascinating films released during the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood. Tracking the development and breakdown of the studio system over the middle decades of the twentieth century, we will closely analyze films like City Lights (1931), Stagecoach (1938), Double Indemnity (1944), Singin’ in the Rain (1952), and Imitation of Life (1959) with an eye to understanding their relationships to the historical and political contexts in which they were made. Along the way, we will be thinking about storytelling, continuity, point of view, technology, genre convention, mass production, and the representation of space and time. Course Material: City Lights (Chaplin, 1931), Trouble in Paradise (Lubitsch, 1932), Bringing Up Baby (Hawks, 1938), Stagecoach (Ford, 1939), Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941), Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942), It’s A Wonderful Life (Capra, 1946), Singin’ in the Rain (Donen, 1952), The Searchers (Ford, 1956), Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944), Mildred Pierce (Curtiz, 1945), All About Eve (Mankiewicz, 1950), The Night of the Hunter (Laughton, 1955), Touch of Evil (Welles, 1958), Written on the Wind (Sirk, 1956), Imitation of Life (Sirk, 1959), Rear Window (Hitchcock, 1954), Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960), Manchurian Candidate (Frankenheimer, 1962), Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick, 1964).

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills