Teaching
2020-2021
Literature and Film: Form, Medium, and Politics
Why do we describe a movie as poetic? What strategies do film directors use to translate a novel’s verbal description and interiority to a visual medium? How does the comic strip’s already visual medium undergo a narrative and formal metamorphosis through on-screen sound, time, and motion? Moreover, what are the political stakes (especially connected to race, gender, and class) of these formal questions in relation to particular texts and films? This course will deal with adaptations in the traditional sense, but also the formal, thematic, and political preoccupations that film shares with various sister arts. In E314J: Literature and Film, the medium of film and its formal elements will provide the stage for us to close read, research, and create original arguments about how film resonates with and responds to three different mediums: poetry, prose, and the graphic novel.
The primary aim of this course is to help students develop and improve the critical reading, writing, and thinking skills needed for success in upper-division courses in English and other disciplines. They will also gain practice in using the Oxford English Dictionary and other online research tools and print resources that support studies in the humanities. Students will learn basic information literacy skills and models for approaching literature with various historical, generic, and cultural contexts in mind.
This course contains a writing flag. The writing assignments in this course are arranged procedurally with a focus on invention, development through instructor and peer feedback, and revision; they will comprise a major part of the final grade.
Texts and Films: Do the Right Thing (dir. Spike Lee, 1989), Manhatta (dir. Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, 1921), Battleship Potemkin (dir. Sergei Eisenstein, 1925), Langston Hughes, Montage of a Dream Deferred (collection of poetry), other poetry by Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Muriel Rukeyser, George Oppen, Frank O’Hara, Adrienne Rich. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (novel), Little Women (dir. Greta Gerwig, 2019), Lady Bird (dir. Greta Gerwig, 2017), Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis (graphic memoir), Persepolis (dir. Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, 2007).
Requirements and Grading: 70% of the final grade will be composed of three short papers, the first of which will be undergo a mandatory revision after peer review and instructor conference, 30% short writing assignments, participation, discussion posts, and student led discussion or presentations.
2019-2020
Rhetoric of Documentary Films
Seeking to find a voice in which to speak about subjects that concern them, filmmakers, like the great orators of the past, speak from the heart in ways that both fit the occasion and issue from it.
-Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary.
“I think I got their trust because I was not looking at them like insects I would film,” states Agnes Varda, a documentary filmmaker and nouvelle vague icon, while discussing her 2006 film on consumption and recycling, The Gleaners and I. How does documentary film, with its roots in anthropological observation and propaganda, eventually come to persuade, move, and build trust with its subjects and audience in the twenty-first century? In this course, we will investigate how documentary filmmakers argue for structural change, open an audience’s eyes to marginalized experiences, and reveal everything from wrongful conviction to the human need to create art. In doing so, we will use the tools of rhetoric to analyze and research documentary films ranging across a multitude of topics and the genre’s history from 1921 to 2018. To aid us in our rhetorical inquiry, we will also read theory on the documentary film as a genre, criticism concerned with particular documentary films, and interviews with documentary filmmakers. Students will have an opportunity to create arguments concerning our core documentary films or to create short documentary films that put into practice the rhetorical strategies we have discussed throughout the semester.
Assignments with Grading Breakdown
10% Participation: based on short writing assignments, group work, and in-class discussion
20% Rhetoric of a Scene Papers
5% Revision Letter for the Revised Rhetoric of a Scene Paper
5% Research Summary
5% Contextual Paper
15% Annotated Bibliography
10% Audience and Media / Venue Paper
10% Opposition Paper or Story Board
20% Argument Paper or Documentary Film with Accompanying Peer-Review Revision Letter
Course Reading List
Becoming Rhetorical: Analyzing and Composing in a Multimedia World, Jodie Nicotra, Cengage Learning, 2018.
Purdue Online Writing Lab, https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/purdue_owl.html, Purdue University.
Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary, Third Edition, Indiana University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/lib/utxa/detail.action?docID=4813367. (Available Online Through the UT Library website)
Documentary films available on Kanopy through the library website or on reserve at the UT Fine Arts Library. Additional course readings available on Canvas.
2018-2019
Introductory Rhetoric and Composition
Fall 2017
Teaching Assistant
Literature and Film
2016-2018