ENROLL

Carol Donelan

After Americans grasped the enormity of the Depression and World War II, the glossy fantasies of 1930s cinema seemed hollow indeed. During the 1940s, the movies, our true national pastime, took a nosedive into pessimism. The result? A collection of exceptional films chocked full of tough guys and bad women lurking in the shadows of nasty urban landscapes. This course focuses on classic as well as neo-noir from a variety of perspectives, including genre and mode, visual style and narrative structure, postwar culture and politics, and gender and race.

Extra Time required. Evening Screenings.

Mara G Block

Passions, pleasures, ecstasies, and desires bear on religion and sexuality alike, but intersections and tensions between these two domains are complicated. This course wagers that bringing the hotly contested categories “queer” and “religion” together will illuminate the diverse range of bodies, activities, and identities that inhabit both. The course explores religion and sexuality in Modern Western thought, erotic elements in religious texts and art, and novels and narratives of religious belief and practice in queer lives. The course combines concrete cases with theoretical tools that queer and feminist scholars have used to analyze religious and sexual communities, bodies, and identities.

Kristin Bloomer