Proposed Courses
Description of Proposed Undergraduate Course in Media and Cultural Studies/Rhetoric: “Videogame Criticism”
The focus of this course is on providing an overview of the predominant tendencies of videogame critique and reflection over the past few decades. Course texts and discussion will emphasize the long history of critical engagement with play, both digital and analog, with an emphasis on the diverse approaches of scholars to understanding what a game is, what it means, and how best to describe it.
As students become familiar with this body of work they will also be actively seeking out and playing games and critiquing them. Class meetings will involve both collaborative game play, rudimentary game design, and application of theories of games and play to various objects of study. Outside of class students will be actively involved in a class social network developing a body of critical reflection on games dedicated to teasing out the place of games within culture. Throughout the course, students’ intellectual production will range from short personal reflections, formal academic critiques, game specifications, and collaborative information resources. The textbook for the class will be a course reader containing excerpts from significant contributions to videogame criticism including Espen Aarseth, Ian Bogost, Alexander Galloway, Janet Murray, T.L. Taylor, and McKenzie Wark. You will also be required to have ready access to a videogame console or computer.
Description of Proposed Undergraduate Course in Film: “Black Film Since 1950”
What is a “black” film? What is “black”? Does the director make a film black? The plot? The politics? The production studio? To answer this question we’ll watch a selection of films that have been associated, both comfortably and uncomfortably, within the genre of black film in the interest of both defining and testing the limits of this genre. With these goals in mind, we’ll develop critical film study techniques while building a descriptive vocabularly unique to black film. Concurrently, we’ll evaluate a body of theory that has attempted to describe, with varying degrees of success, what blackness is. Our thinking, discussing, and writing about black film will pay particular attention to notions of authenticity, productive apparatus, and signification.
Sample Texts:
- Film
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
Nothing But a Man
Sweet Sweet Back’s Baadasssss Song
Ganja and Hess
Killer of Sheep
Chameleon Street
Do the Right Thing
From Hell
- Books (selections from)
Black American Cinema Manthia Diawara
Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks Donald Bogle
Redefining Black Film Mark Reid
Black Film as Signifying Practice Gladstone Yearwood
Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation Michael D. Harris
Description of Proposed Graduate Course: “Technologies of Race”
Wendy Chun has questioned whether race can “be considered a technology or a form of media” that both uses and is used by the subject. This course will explore this provocation tracing a western history of technocultural race from the emergence of modern racialogical thinking in the Atlantic to its present genetic articulations and beyond. Our focus will be on mapping, in brief, the different forms race has taken over the past six centuries paying particular attention to the past two centuries. We’ll consider how race has been configured as a media technology and how conceptualizations of race have changed along with techno-epistemic shifts. Along with a final research paper, students will be tasked with pairing one of the critical texts with a primary work explicating and evaluating the critical work through application to the primary work.
Sample Texts:
- Books and Articles
‘Society Must Be Defended’ Michel Foucault
“Race and/as Technology; or, How to Do Things to Race” Wendy Chun
“New Technologies of Race” Evelynn Hammonds
The Racial Contract Charles Mills
Cybertypes Lisa Nakamura
The Black Atlantic Paul Gilroy
- Film
The Brother from Another Planet
Bamboozled
- Interactive
Den of the Marrow Monkey Erik Loyer
- Photography
August Sander
- Music
Dead Prez
Description of Proposed Graduate Course: “Playing with Power”
One of the earliest examples of game scholarship, Marsha Kinder’s Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games (1993), uses psychoanalytic theory to understand children’s use of the Nintendo Entertainment System as a productive power fantasy. Recent work by Alexander Galloway, drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript On Societies of Control” (1995), suggests that games are less an expression of power by the player and more an allegory of networks of control. We’ll operate between these two poles, exploring various theories of power and control and their application to the meaning of videogames and to the description of videogame cultures. Politicized play beyond digital gaming will also be considered, particularly the fluxus art movement and alternative reality games. This non-digital or hybrid play will aid us in questioning whether the power structures of games can/should be surmounted within or beyond the boundaries of the digital artifact. Students will create a blog community of critical play analyses, both digital and otherwise, along with delivering a final research paper and project description of a practical implementation of counter-play/tactical media.
Sample Texts:
- Books and Articles
Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture Alexander Galloway
“Postscript on the Societies of Control” Gilles Deleuze
Tactical Media Rita Raley
Homo Sacer Giorgio Agamben
My Mother Was a Computer N. Katherine Hayles
Control and Freedom Wendy Chun
Discipline and Punish Michel Foucault
On the Postcolony Achille Mbembe
Empire Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Parables for the Virtual Brian Massumi
- Film
ExistenZ
- Games
Metal Gear Solid 2
Bioshock
Tedium
- Art
Every Icon John F. Simon
