LIT 328 Film Criticism

(Formerly DRA 305) 

3 hours 

In this course students will master a range of approaches to the study of the cinema. They will watch and study individual films, including thrillers, comedies, musicals and horror movies, and study film movements and national cinemas, such as Asian action films, Bollywood dramas, European art cinema, feminist filmmaking, and cinema from developing nations. Students will apply a range of critical and theoretical approaches to these films and cinema movements, such as historical criticism, auteur theory, genre study, rhetoric, feminist and Marxist criticism, queer theory, postcolonial, and aesthetic theory. Students will generate written and verbal studies of film and deepen their critical, argumentation, and reasoning skills through participation in classroom debates and discussions. The topics explored will vary from semester to semester depending on the instructor's area of specialization.