FALL 2022 CORE-UA 711, Expressive Culture: The Graphic Novel
Prof. Borenstein (Russian and Slavic Studies)
Examines the interplay between words and images in the graphic novel, a hybrid medium with a system of communication reminiscent of prose fiction, animation, and film. What is the connection between text and art? How are internal psychology, time, and action conveyed in a static series of words and pictures? What can the graphic novel convey that other media cannot? Authors include Alan Moore, Art Spiegelman, Peter Milligan, Charles Burns, Carla Speed McNeil.
FALL 2022 CORE-UA 722, Expressive Culture: Architecture in New York Field Study
Prof. Broderick (Art History) [Syllabus]
New York's rich architectural heritage offers a unique opportunity for firsthand consideration of the concepts and styles of modern urban architecture, as well as its social, financial, and cultural contexts. Meets once a week for an extended period combining on-campus lectures with group excursions to prominent buildings. Attention is given both to individual buildings as examples of 19th- and 20th-century architecture and to phenomena such as the development of the skyscraper and the adaptation of older buildings to new uses.
FALL 2022 CORE-UA 725, Expressive Culture: Architecture
Prof. Cohen (Institute of Fine Arts)
Modern Architecture, 1900 to the Present. A diachronic account of architecture and urban design since 1900, exploring broadly developments that have taken place on all the continents, from the apex of imperialism to the postcolonial, globalized world of today. Topics include: the conflicting currents that emerged before the First World War, new technological developments, and the impact of the war; architecture and politics in the 1920s and 1930s with the rise of expressionist design, the “international style,” and the concurrent adaptation of traditional styles; colonial policies and their languages; the impact of the Second World War on architectural discourse and practice; mid-twentieth century corporate architecture, brutalism, and the reactions to late modernism; the invention of postcolonial built forms in their variety; and the main aspects and the divides of contemporary architectural designs, as they deal with environmental and social challenges. The analysis associates a precise consideration of form and an interpretation of ideological and political dimensions in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Oscar Niemeyer, Louis Kahn, Alvar Aalto, James Stirling, Alvaro Siza, Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, as well as of several contemporary designers.
FALL 2022 CORE-UA 730, Expressive Culture: Sounds
Prof. [Staff] (Music)
Our lives pulsate with patterns of sounds that we call music, yet we rarely think consciously about what they mean. Questions how music has been created, produced, perceived, and evaluated at diverse historical moments, in a variety of geographical locations, and among different cultural groups. Through aural explorations and discussion of how these vivid worlds "sound" in time and space, assesses the value and function of music in human experience.
FALL 2022 CORE-UA 750, Expressive Culture: Film
Prof. Polan (Cinema Studies)
Citizen Kane and Hollywood Movie-Making. Within the history of American film, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane from 1941 enjoys special status as a work that pushed Hollywood studio filmmaking in experimental directions, with its complicated editing, deep focus, and complex sound design. It has energetic supporters (it was for many years the front-runner in the film magazine Sight & Sound poll of critics’ top film) and detractors (for example, the German exile philosophers Horkheimer and Adorno saw it as the key example of Hollywood paying lip service to experimentalism, all the better to close it off everywhere else). We examine the phenomenon of Citizen Kane through both close reading (shot-by-shot analysis) and broader, contextual study, including the nature of the Hollywood studio system, questions around film authorship, and notions of genre; and look at films by other directors from the Hollywood studio era as a point of comparison and contrast. Above all, we study editing, shot composition, narrative structure, and acting in the composition of Citizen Kane as a work of Hollywood experimentation.