Comparative Literature 596 – Special Studies in Comparative Literature

This course will focus on three key topics in contemporary film and media theory. The first section of the course will examine the recent revival of interest in the relationship between philosophy and cinema. Reading may include work by Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Rancière, and Slavoj Zizek. A second section will consider the role of archives and theories of the archive in recent cinema and media studies, with emphasis on both the collection and preservation of film and other images (that is, an archive viewed in the more technical sense of the term) and the documentary quality of moving images (that is, film and media serving as a form of historical object and testimony, as an archive in another sense). A third section will consider the challenges posed by new media to film studies, to philosophy, and to our understanding of the archive. Within all of these sections, the overarching goal of the course will be to study the extremes of film studies, from the abstractions of philosophy to the materiality of the archive and production conditions, and to introduce some of the diverse methods and perspectives at work in the discipline today.