Steven Cohan's Recent Courses

ETS 145: Reading Popular Culture

ETS 145 aims to provide students with an opportunity to study critically the media-oriented culture in which they inhabit, concentrating specifically on the popular entertainment that, for participants and observers alike, comprises so much of the materiality of American culture today. Using the methodology of cultural studies—which operates on the premise that lived culture and its artifacts are appropriate objects of academic study, as readable as any literary or artistic text—the course will introduce students to critical strategies for thinking about the world in which they live, and for approaching the work of popular culture historically as well as analytically. The course will view some prime objects of popular culture—for instance a blockbuster film or TV series like Pirates of the Caribbean or CSI or a cult film or series like Fight Club and Buffy the Vampire Slayer—from several intersecting perspectives in order to determine what these exemplary texts mean in and for audiences comprising our “culture” (and pluralizing it).  We will pay close attention to the textual features and conventions that compose a film or TV show as an entertainment form, while also investigating its production (considering the import of the corporate enterprises that produce film and television, for instance) and reception (looking at fan formations on the internet to see what kind of alternate meanings they construct).  As this description indicates, the focus of the course will be on film and television—on popular narratives—though not exclusively; and in addition to the media texts we study, which will be shown at the required weekly screenings on Wednesday evenings, there will be supplementary reading about popular culture, an introduction to cultural studies and an anthology or course reader.  The reading assignments are meant to give us theoretical, critical, and methodological perspectives for talking about the cultural objects we’re studying; their conjunction with a particular film or TV show on the syllabus will provide a lens for focusing our discussion of it in class.  In addition, we will use the internet in class and on student projects both for research and as an object of study in its own right.

ETS 154  Interpretation of Film

This course is an introduction to the interpretation of film.  Accordingly, the course is not an overview of the filmic medium, film genres, film history, or film masterpieces.  Rather it emphasizes, introducing students to the basis of, film analysis.  Using films selected because they illustrate certain issues of interpretation, the course combines close attention to the aesthetic, formal, and rhetorical aspects of film with an investigation of the social and cultural contexts that shape how we make sense of and take pleasure from films.  We shall also devote attention to questions of history: How may one interpret a film in relation to its historical context—and to our own?  Film history incorporates not only the films that have been produced over the past one hundred years, but also an understanding of how the practice of moviegoing and filmmaking has transformed during that time. This course is recommended for students wishing to take more specialized and advanced ETS courses in film studies. 

ETS 340 Theorizing Forms and Genres: Narrative and Film 

This section of ETS 340 investigates from a theoretical perspective the relation between film and narrative, the dominant mode of representation in the experience most of us have with cinema.  The course will explore the fundamental elements of narrativity, which not only includes the stories told on film but how and to whom these stories are told as well.  To what extent can one actually separate a story from the structure that shapes it and the visuality that renders it?  Do we in fact approach films with a theorization of narrative and the mechanics of cinematic story-telling already in place, even though we may not be conscious of doing so?  And if that is the case, where and how do we learn to watch a film for the story it tells?  For that matter, if certain understandings of a story’s formal operation and generic conventions tend to dominate—audiences do usually laugh or scream or be bored together—why is interpretation not predetermined or fixed, but often the subject of debate, with the meanings of some films dramatically changing over time?  What crucial roles do history, culture, and ideology play in our understanding of how films operate as narratives?  To begin answering these questions, which have been the motivation of film theory during the past several decades, the course will study films selected to work out the issues raised by theoretical readings about narrative and film.  The course will therefore give equal emphasis to the close analysis of specific films and the narrative theory that can help to direct and expand upon what we look for.  Some of this reading will be difficult, at least at first, but hopefully, it will prove to be intellectually challenging. 

ETS 340  Theorizing Forms and Genres:  The Hollywood Musical

This course studies the Hollywood musical, concentrating on its moment of greatest popularity in American culture in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and focusing in particular (but not exclusively) on the history of MGM, its special Arthur Freed unit, its directors Busby Berkeley, Vincente Minnelli, Stanley Donen, and its stars Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Lena Horne. Today the musical seems either a highly specialized taste or a guilty pleasure, at once representing the acme of the old studio era and its inaccessibility; but those old musicals also will never disappear, not because they are “classic,” but because of Turner Classic Movies and gay men.   Yet what about the musical’s popularity—not only in the past, but today as well—among straight women, lesbians, straight men, not to say audiences further divided according to race, class, and generation?  Hopefully, the course will lead us collectively to consider the historical merits as well as limitations of the presumption that the Hollywood musical now only addresses a gay subculture.

The course will begin by examining the musical as a cinematic form, identifying and analyzing its narrative conventions, modes of addressing spectators, and celebration of  popular entertainment as a utopian vision of social cohesion, nationalism, and normality.  From here the course will go on to place the musical in wider and overlapping contexts, considering the genre’s promotion of star personae as a crucial intertext; the importance of technology in supporting the value of the integration of song and story both within the multiply layered fictive world of a musical and in the apparatus of studio production; the tension between, on one hand, the performance styles, studio labor, and star personalities informing and decontextualizing musical numbers as spectacular excess, and, on the other, the ideologies of social integration, natural-born talent, and heterosexual normality reiterated by the genre’s conventional narratives; the historical background of the musical’s widespread popularity among mainstream audiences during the studio era; the relation of the Hollywood musical to queer camp as a politics of gender rebellion and resistance to binarized sexual differentiation, with the form’s conventions and their meanings revised by cult audiences; and the renewed commercial value of the musical as the “New Hollywood” remythifies and commodifies “Classic Hollywood.”  I have not organized the course to raise these issues in sequence and then find them thematized in specific musicals but, rather, want to keep them in continual circulation as they inform the perspective from which we examine the Hollywood musical.

ETS 360 Reading Gender and Sexualities: Cinema and Sexual Difference

This course studies the representation of sexual difference in mainstream US film. The course's goal as a political mode of inquiry in the ETS curriculum is to examine how film as a cultural institution reproduces but also challenges the dominant ideology of a binarized heterosexual gender system.  Films selected include both contemporary and older films, aiming for something of a historical perspective, and the syllabus is sequentially organized around the problematics of femininity, masculinity, and queer sexualities, although as the course progresses we shall rather quickly see that these are in fact interrelated.  Along the way, topics to be discussed include (in the order in which the course will probably raise them): spectating and spectacle, the (in)authenticity of the image, the body as signifier and signified, gender as a performative masquerade, stardom and ideology, crossdressing and cultural subversions.

ENG 630  Film Melodrama

This course will study the history of melodrama in American film as well as the contextualization of film melodrama in US cultural and social history.  Gender, sexuality, class, race, and the family will be issues dominating the course to a great extent, since they seem crucial to the melodramatic form, its recurring conventions and themes.  However, the very term “melodrama” will be treated as a problematic for the course too: just what is melodrama? It has been considered a genre—sometimes called “the woman’s film”—which emphasizes exaggerated emotions, interpersonal conflicts, and plots that rely on contrivance and stereotypical characters to project a moral universe of good and evil; in many respects, as a genre melodrama appears to have migrated to television in the form of soap operas, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and made-for-TV movies on the Lifetime cable channel.  Melodrama can also be examined as a cinematic style of excess, evident in mise-en-scène, music, star iconography, and performance techniques.  For that matter, melodrama has also been approached as a modality of narrative essential to film and other popular forms (for instance, in the way that star biographies or “up close and personal” stories of Olympic athletes are framed), the opposite of “realism.”  Viewed as a narrative mode, and recalling the original sense of the term from its origin in theater (“drama with music”), melodrama can be seen as intrinsic to, perhaps even equivalent with, the film medium as developed in the US from the silent era through the present.  From this latter perspective the melodramatic dimension of film challenges dominant aesthetic assumptions about the medium’s realism.  Regardless of how it is understood, it is hard to deny that melodrama has been and continues to be essential to the way that film speaks to and connects with popular culture.

ENG 890  Hitchcock in America: History, Theory, Politics

This seminar will use Hitchcock's American films as an occasion for examining some of the primary issues raised in contemporary critical studies of literature and film.  The course takes a double premise: on one hand, studying how these films represent “America,” and on the other hand, exploring the question of why, alone among filmmakers, “Hitchcock” has been used as the exemplary text for each paradigm shift in the history of film studies.   Broadly speaking, the course reading will follow a path from auteurist criticism to psychoanalytical and feminist film theory to queer theory and cultural studies.

ENG 890 Film Noir  and the Cultural Politics of Gender