English 166

Special Topics: Literature in the Century of Film

Other Readings and Media

Stoker, B., Dracula; Dreiser, T., Sister Carrie; Johnson, J. W., The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man; West, N., Day of the Locusts; Cendrars, B., Hollywood: Mecca of the Movies; Fitzgerald, F. S., The Last Tycoon; Lambert, G., Inside Daisy Clover; Gibson, W., Pattern Recognition.

Description

This course examines the intersections between literature and visual media in the twentieth century, with a particular focus on film and its cultural effects. We will read novels, short stories, poetry, and essays that not only track the social and historical implications of cinema, but also show how literature tries to understand its situation and appeal among competing media technologies. Lectures and discussions will consider such topics as the status of reading in a culture of looking, the politics of mass popularity, celebrity as a way of life, and the commercial origins of the modern work of art. The course also looks at what happens when �new� media, such as film, grow old and perhaps even die, and charts the literary emergence of film connoisseurship as a response to TV and other technologies that come to challenge film�s place as the century�s dominant medium. Of particular interest will be texts and films that directly address the mythology of Hollywood, as well as writers who borrow from film practice and technique as an aesthetic resource.

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