Courses for the online MA in Literature Studies Program, Northwestern University School of Professional Studies - Northwestern School of Professional Studies

Program Courses

Please note that course schedules may be amended due to low enrollment, faculty availability, and/or other factors.

Online Sync Sessions are an integral part of the online learning experience. Additional information about learning concepts and assignments may be discussed and sync sessions offer valuable opportunities for students to interact with their faculty and peers during the term. We encourage all students to attend live, but if they are unable to, sync sessions will be recorded and posted within Canvas to allow for an asynchronous model of success as well.

LIT 492-0 : Special Topics in Lit: American Cinema: Race, Gender, and the Melodramatic Imagination

Description

Melodrama has shaped American mass culture since the nineteenth century. With its penchant for stark oppositions, heightened emotions, and hyperdramatization, the melodramatic mode has played out across disparate media, from literature and theatre to film and television, leaving no genre untouched. This course will explore the longstanding alliance between Hollywood cinema and melodrama, focusing on how it has influenced the way we make sense of gender and race relations and envision their intersectionality. We will begin by analyzing D.W. Griffith’s infamous Birth of a Nation (1915) and Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1919), a bold response to Griffith and the first existent feature by a Black director, and then focus on key films across the decades, including Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959), Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967), Tod Haynes’ Far From Heaven (2002), and Barry Jenkin’s Moonlight (2016). While reading texts from film and visual studies, feminist/queer theory, and critical race theory, we will ask questions of representation, ideology, affect, social justice and change. Last but not least, we will consider films that have problematized the Hollywood model, from John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959) to Julie Dash’s Illusions (1982) and Haile Gerima’s Sankofa (1993). (This course may count towards the American Literature, Film, Literature, and Visual Culture or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature program. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies program. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program. Additionally, this course may count towards certificates of graduate studies.)