Results for COMPLIT104

What can the humanities teach us about deep time? Can human beings even conceive of the vast and unfathomable timescales presupposed by geology? The challenge that deep time poses to the human imagination - a challenge that has grown all the more urgent to address in light of our current environmental crisis - will be approached in this course 1. By considering how artists and writers create their own scales of measure in relation to deep time 2. By taking seriously claims of non-human animism in diverse cultural traditions 3. By examining how rhythms of human and non-human life are inscribed in specific literary and artistic works. Assignments in this seminar/arts practicum course will be creative and multimedia in kind. The course includes field trips to the Redwood forest and to the Hopkins Marine Station.

Controlling people's minds through propaganda is an integral part of fascist regimes' totalitarianism. In the interwar, cinema, a relatively recent mass media, was immediately seized upon by fascist regimes to produce aggrandizing national narratives, justify their expansionist and extermination policies, celebrate the myth of the "Leader," and indoctrinate the people. Yet film makers under these regimes (Rossellini, Renoir) or just after their fall, used the same media to explore and expose how they manufactured conformism, obedience, and mass murder and to interrogate fascism. We will watch films produced by or under European fascist regimes (Nazi Germany, Italy under Mussolini, Greece's Regime of the Colonels) but also against them. The seminar introduces key film analysis tools and concepts, while offering insights into the history of propaganda and cinema. Taught in English.