Exams

New Queer Cinema by B. Ruby Rich

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Derek Jarman’s Edward II

Rich, B. Ruby. 2013. New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut. Durham: Duke UP.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

This one is different from most of the other texts on my reading list as it isn’t strictly a work of theory. Rather, it is a hybrid which mixes theory with reportage and mainstream (relatively) criticism. B. Ruby Rich is the person who invented the term New Queer Cinema, which describes the corpus of films from the late 80s through the mid 90s that worked to bring queer voices to audiences through independent cinema. Rich traces this era’s predecessors in one chapter, then spends much of the back half of the book exploring some new avenues that opened up outside of the relatively localized (in time and space) phenomenon of NQC, including sections on “Queering Latin American Cinema” and the mainstreaming of gay and lesbian stories in films like Brokeback Mountain and Milk. Rich’s primary contention is that NQC was a vibrant and exciting movement/moment, even if it was always somewhat compromised by audience and (therefore) capitalist desires.

Rich is keen to point out, from the beginning and throughout, the privilege given to white gay male voices in this movement, with people like Gus Van Sant and Todd Haynes able to launch successful mainstream careers off of their NQC beginnings while creators of color and lesbians were less likely to break through in that way. She mostly also speaks of the filmic incarnation of the NQC, only deigning to write about television and the effects it had on the aims and financial viability of NQC via figures like Ellen Degeneres. She also mentions, briefly, what she calls a New Trans Cinema that she saw just beginning as she was compiling and adding to this text. It seems to me that the NQC and NTC are related if different movements/moments, and I’m curious as to what current and future scholarship will have to say on that front.

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Rich doesn’t do much debating here, her aim is more historiographic/photographic, reporting her perspective on the films and filmmakers (and distribution venues like queer film festivals and museums) in the moment, and occasionally in retrospect, as in the opening and closing essays. The things Rich is most often in conversation with is the film itself, and sometimes the other popular press critics who perform the same kind of work that she does here. As such, there isn’t the rigorous thought that one expects from the theory-based monograph. What it lacks in that area is made up for in enthusiasm, advocacy (I added like 5 movies to my watchlist based on reading the sections I did alone), and a fascinating sense of a developing canon in process. Many of the essays contained herein feel of the moment and aware of that specificity, much to Rich’s benefit.

The essay on Brokeback Mountain is a bit different, as it takes as one of its main interests the reaction to the film’s success. Here Rich compiles and juxtaposes the way that mainstream media treated the film with “ambivalent snickering” while queer audiences tried to decide if the film was gay enough and audiences outside of the more accepting areas of the US sometimes were able to see themselves on screen for the first time given the film’s wide theatrical distribution (185). This essay was of the most interest to me, as it articulated the kind of event where an element of independent cinema (here queer representation as popularized by NQC) becomes coopted by mainstream filmmaking and creates a cultural moment out of it. I also appreciated Rich’s ability to both advocate for the film’s admirable qualities while giving its critics a proper hearing. Something to keep in mind.

Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Depends on the essay. As I said, some are historical in nature, reaching back for antecedents and forbearers, while others operate as film reviews written concurrently with major releases of the NQC (Mysterious Skin, The Watermelon Woman). Still others are opinion pieces on where the movement is currently and where it might go, while others stake claims out for similar movements in other locations.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

Rich lays out in the introduction a four-ingredient recipe for the historical context which gave birth to the NQC: “the arrival of AIDS, Reagan, camcorders, and cheap rent” to which she adds the mixing device of the newly-articulated conception of a queer community and label (xvi). She returns over and over again to these five elements, tracing their meaning and impact on the creators and audiences of the NQC as well as their development (for instance, the movement from 16mm film to video for cheapness and ease-of-use, which later changes again (for some) back to film as they are able to lure studios into financing their films).

She also argues that NQC enjoyed a brief time in the spotlight as the excitement of audiences to see either themselves or something new on screen led to a boom in money and attention, at least for the white men making these kinds of movies. But when that became less exciting and new, the money also quickly disappeared. However, she notes that the briefness of the NQC’s time in the sun did create lasting changes, with mainstream movies more likely to take on (versions of) the kind of stories and representation that drove the films of the NQC. Late 90s examples like Boys Don’t Cry and The Talented Mr. Ripley are decidedly not as vibrant or interested in advocacy as the films of the NQC proper are, but they also feel deeply indebted to those earlier films and filmmakers.

Finally, Rich argues in the closing lines of her conclusion that we are not living in a post-queer (or post-NQC) world, even though both concepts have gained mainstream acceptance, at least to a point. Instead, she puts the current (in 2013) moment as optimistically “pre-” something. Unsure exactly as to what that thing will be, Rich still powerfully posits not an end of queerness but a continuation in line with the kind of work she does throughout the text to show that NQC/queerness are not codified and ossified categories but fluid and expansive movements/moments.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

I’ve already mentioned most of this here, I think the text works best as exactly what it is, a report/retrospective look at a cinematic movement and moment in time and place. Its greatest strengths are as history and advocacy, not theory, though Rich does offer some useful explanations for what NQC is and why/how it works.

It intersects with one of my major interests, the mainstreaming of independent aesthetics and topics, while also interacting with feminist and race-based theories of film and filmmaking politics.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

New Queer Cinema, queer, mainstream, independent, representation, aesthetics, cultural studies

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

Emanating from a (mostly) new generation, the NQC embodied an evolution in thinking. It reinterpreted the link between the personal and the political envisioned by feminism, restaged the defiant activism pioneered at Stonewall, and recoded aesthetics to link the independent feature movement with the avant-garde and start afresh. (xv)

Newly invented camcorders enabled the easy production of electronic media at the personal level for the first time in history. A new generation emerging from art school seized the new tools to reimagine cinema with a video eye, revising the medium thrillingly from the bottom up. In the streets, the camcorder enabled the reversal of surveillance: police could now be recorded by the crowds. (xvii)

As urgency and rage began to collapse into despair and frustration for the ACT UP generation, the New Queer Cinema created a space of reflection, nourishment, and renewed engagement. The NQC quickly grew – embryonically at first, with its first steps in the years 1985-91, then bursting into full view in 1992-97 with formidable force. Its arrival was accompanied by the thrill of having enough queer videos and films to reach critical mass and tip over into visibility. An invention. A brand. A niche market. (xix)

That synergy of creative and critical impulses is one of the lessons of the NQC, or so I hope: the power that comes with inhabiting historical time, writing in sync with a moment of palpable importance, a synchrony that endows anyone lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time with powers of prescience that might otherwise fall by the wayside. (xx)

Of course, the new queer films and videos aren’t all the same and don’t share a single aesthetic vocabulary, strategy, or concern. Nonetheless they are united by a common style: call it “Homo Pomo.” In all of them, there are traces of appropriation, pastiche, and irony, as well as a reworking of history with social constructionism very much in mind. Definitively breaking with older humanist approaches and the films and tapes that accompanied identity politics, these works are irreverent, energetic, alternately minimalist, and excessive. Above all, they are full of pleasure. They’re here, they’re queer, get hip to them. (18)

Moments of origin always cast a long shadow. Today’s queer film and video still bear a birthright linked to the umbilical cord of post-Stonewall gestation. There’s a generation of elders that expect film and video to toe an eternally prescribed line of righteousness and legitimacy, while ever new and needy generations recycle the old and add their own requirements. These queer publics want films of validation and a culture of affirmation: work that can reinforce identity, visualize respectability, combat injustice, and bolster social status. They want a little something new, but not too new; sexy, sure, but with the emphasis on romance; stylish, but reliably realistic and not too demanding; nothing downbeat or too revelatory; and happy endings, of course. It’s an audience that wants, not difference or challenge, but rather a reflection up there on the screen of its collective best foot forward. Part of the audience also wants higher production values than the independence can deliver: a queer Hollywood, popcorn movies for a fun Saturday night out. (41)

If we limit ourselves to what we see in the mirror, we’re lost. If we’re scared of anything new or different, or made uneasy by films and videos that challenge our notions of the homonatural universe, we’ll be stuck with the status quo. If queer audiences stay away from controversial groundbreaking work, then the distributors and studios, those who watch the box office like a seismologist watches the Richter needle, will pull out completely. And the queer community will be abandoned, condemned to a static universe, comforted only by the sure knowledge that the earth, alas, won’t move under our feet. (45)

Such films could have signaled a moment of triumphant consolidation for the NQC, yet the opposite would seem to suggest itself: The NQC has become so successful that it has dispersed itself in any number of elsewheres. Lacking the concentrated creative presence and focused community responsiveness of its origin moment, NQC has become just another product line pitched at one particular type of discerning customer. At a time when casting has become essential to getting independent films financed and produced, it’s clear why actors have to be involved. On the other hand, it’s the runaway success of the NQC films that has turned them into such welcome vehicles for actors, reversing the trend that in the past saw actors turn away from films that in any way pushed sexual identity into a zone of ambiguity – a move, in other words, from career poison to career honeypot. (134)

I decided that it wasn’t trying to invent a new style exactly. It was trying to mobilize the most classic and accepted of styles in support of a grand love story, the scope of which we hadn’t seen before with a homosexual theme. In this reliance on familiar forms and mainstream affect, of course, Brokeback was virtually the opposite of the NQC that had come before it, and yet it was impossible to imagine Lee’s film ever being made, or even imagined, without that precedent. (190-1)

Brokeback Mountain was an event movie, one that sought with old-fashioned ambition to straddle marketplaces and move beyond self-identified audiences. That strategy is unlikely to appeal to all members of the LGBT community prepared to cast judgment on any such gesture. Universalism, for good reason, is suspect by now. But what takes its place, then? Limited releases? Mutually exclusive niches in our increasingly niche-fueled society? No-budget digital stories distributed by download? Brokeback Mountain was a mainstream release inspired by a widely read story by an established author, written by highly regarded screenwriters, directed by a name-brand heterosexual director. A post-identity politics epic. And a hit. Whether that’s a good or a bad development will have to be decided, as usual, in hindsight. (199)

Most important for this volume, new queer cinema changed: first it expanded into something, then nothing, and then everything – a relatively rapid transformation from the fringe to the center at the level of subjects and themes. Once taboo or titillating, queers were now the stuff of art films, crossover movies, and television series. Thank you, HBO. Thank you, Focus Features. Or, some might argue, No thanks. As decisively as the outlaw seemed to disappear from LGBT culture, so did the radical import of NQC disappear from the films that it had made possible. Yes, I’m happy to have more rights, but oh how I missed the outlawry of the old days. (262)

When I am asked yet again whether today’s films are postqueer, the kind of term usually intended to signal defeat or compromise or at best stasis, I opt for a different formulation altogether. Far from bereft, I remain optimistic, sure that we aren’t after the fact at all, not post-anything. We are surely and absolutely . . . pre-. (282-3)

Feminist Film Studies by Janet McCabe

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McCabe, Janet. 2004. Feminist Film Studies: Writing the Woman into Cinema. Short Cuts 23. New York: Wallflower Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

In this book, Janet McCabe uses some broad themes and modes of thinking as ways of temporalizing the history of feminist film theory. Since, as she notes in her conclusion, each new way of practicing feminist film theory tended to criticize the way that came before it for its biggest failures, there is little (that I know of) left out, except for developments that have happened since the book’s publication in 2004 (one area that I know of being the further expansion of theorization surrounding gender with trans and non-binary identities becoming an increasingly popular area of study recently).

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

McCabe proposes very little in way of new theory or even a point of view on the scholars and ideas she writes about here. Only her conclusion has a real thesis to it, one which emphasizes the need to study feminist film theory as a discourse to fully understand what is going on with it both in its past and present configurations. This fits with how she structures the book, putting different authors in conversation with each other via either explicit or thematic connections between their works, with a roughly continuous temporal development.

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

As McCabe moves from one method of performing feminist film theory to the next, she begins each chapter with a brief summary of what will be covered and how changing analytical and cultural trends influenced the direction of the writing done in that time period. Sometimes that change might be the introduction of a new kind of criticism (the introduction of cultural studies, for example) or a group of writers insisting that attention must also be paid to them and their representation/ways of seeing (black women, lesbians). This grounds McCabe’s historical project in material realities and creates a context for what will come in the chapter. Then each chapter proceeds by laying out the ground level theory (often originally written by men like Metz or, god help us, Freud) before showing how feminist film theorists used that theory to write about women, who were often ignored by the men who wrote the high theory. Finally, she concludes each chapter by recapping what major changes happened during the time period covered and looking a little bit at what was missing, to be filled in by scholars in the next chapter.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

Here I’ll just list out the large thematic shifts and some representative scholars that McCabe capsulizes in each chapter.

1973-79 – Structuring a language of theory: In this period, feminist film theorists adopted theoretical approaches (psychoanalysis and semiotics, mostly) to talk about how women were conceived of as a symbol, specifically a symbol of lack such that they really only existed to be looked at on film. Prominent scholars: Laura Mulvey, Claire Johnston

1985-1997 – Textual Negotiations: Female Spectatorship and Cultural Studies: In this period, feminist film theorists looked to cultural studies to see how real audiences engaged film in specific times and places. This allowed for a greater understanding of the various negotiations that happened between author, text, and audience as well as a pathway towards understanding how the makeup of an audience will influence how that audience responds to different texts. Feminist film theory here becomes more focused on context, history, and lived experience rather than the generalizing tendency of psychoanalysis. Prominent scholars: Christine Gledhill, Tania Modleski, Annette Kuhn, Jackie Stacey, bell hooks

1991-2000 – Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonialism/Modernism. In this period, which overlaps significantly with the previous period, scholars began to correct feminist film theory away from its singular focus on white female existence towards trying to understand what happens when gender isn’t the only way a character, creator, or audience member is othered from the dominant cis-white-het norm. Using Frantz Fanon’s psychoanalytic theory of race as a jumping off point, scholars of this era theorized that black women were doubly absent, doubly sexualized, doubly lacking on film. Some scholars also looked at the way colonialism created a gaze towards black and brown women that was wrapped up in an imperialist (as well as misogynist and racist) mindset. Finally, scholars and creators of this era also used ways of creating and documenting the previously overlooked history of people like them. Daughters of the Dust is the primary example here. Prominent scholars: Jane Gaines, Mary Anne Doane, Lola Young, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Tania Modleski

1987 – 2000 – Conceiving Subjectivity, Sexual Difference and Fantasy Differently: Psychoanalysis Revisited and Queering Theory: In this period, scholars returned to psychoanalysis to rethink female sexuality and how women might desire differently through film. Taking as their primary concern the ideas of desire and fantasy, scholars of this era tried to dig deeper into pscyhoanalysis through Freud’s ideas on female sexuality and masturbatory practices to understand what connection spectators had to the spectacle of women on film. Additionally, lesbian/gay and queer theorists questioned why we were even paying attention to Freud in the first place, positing instead an attention to how queer audiences opened a doorway to alternative spectator positions not theorizable in a film theory dominated by heterosexual norms. Prominent scholars: Mary Anne Doane, Elizabeth Cowie, Linda Williams, Carol Clover, Kaja Silverman, Judith Mayne, Judith Butler

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

This is most useful in to me in the above form, as a kind of overview of the different methodologies and conversations that have happened with regards to feminist film theory. I’m not sure much of the theorists individual ideas will stick with me for very long after reading them in this format, as there’s not enough to really grasp here. But it is useful as something to go back to when I need a refresher or a quick recap before diving into some related readings.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

psychoanalysis, spectator, desire, fantasy, race, ethnicity, cultural studies, historical materialism, queer theory, feminist film theory, discourse, postcolonialism, postmodernism

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

Studying the field of knowledge known as feminist film studies allows us to read it as a set of statements about the institution of cinema and cultural production, about representational categories and gendered subjectivity, about identification and spectatorship practices, about cultural authority and historical (in)visibility, about desire and fantasy, and about the interaction between these areas. (1-2)

I suggest we may in fact have reached a point when it might be more important to gain knowledge about the features of feminist writings on film and cinema; for in understanding what feminist film theory wants us to know exposes the workings of a discourse as well as the difficulties that still remain in articulating it. (113)

I identify feminist film theory as a discourse; that is, a discursive formation made up from a series of statements within which, and by which, debates related to gendered representation, female subjectivity and spectatorship can be known. […] By analyzing the statements that constitute the making of a field of knowledge, we can see how the speakers and listeners, writers and readers come to know who they are within the social world. (118)

The more feminist film theory gains respectability within the academy, the more its methodological differences/difficulties are revealed as problems of legitimacy and credibility and speaking from inside the discipline. It is discourse about (rather than in) crisis, in which the female subject – as film protagonist, cinema spectator and academic scholar – continues to trouble. (120)

The Eloquent Screen by Gilberto Perez

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Perez, Gilberto. 2019. The Eloquent Screen: A Rhetoric of Film. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Perez examines how film makes its imprint on its audiences via a wide-ranging study of different filmic techniques and their effects. He does this in order to counter some prior theories of film’s effects (particularly Lacanian and apparatus theory) and posit an alternate study of the “way construction elicits response” (xix). Perez explicitly places rhetoric between studies of poetics and reception to more thoroughly examine the relationship between the two.

Though Perez focuses mostly on American film, it is clear that his desire is to build a way of looking at film that will work across boundaries of time, space, and different groups of audiences (even if that last part is more implicit than explicit). In other words, Perez occasionally runs into the problems of creating a universal spectator, undifferentiated and unexamined, which feminist, race, and queer theorists have problematized.

Perez does rescue some films from previous interpretations that have portrayed the films (such as Ford’s The Sun Shines Bright and Young Mister Lincoln in the opening section) as one-dimensional by the likes of the folks at Cahiers du Cinema. The penultimate section, on melodrama, similarly reexamines some films that have been dismissed by the genre(?) affiliation, as well as some movies (horror in particular) that have been, by some, pushed outside of that genre’s boundaries.

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

I’ve already addressed who this work is responding to and why, so here I’ll tackle its intervention in a bit more detail. I’ve read (and studied with) some rhetorical narrative theorist here at OSU, and I am intrigued and convinced by it as a theory of literature. I had thought of some ways it might apply to film, but hoped that a book like this would come along on my reading list to make some of the arguments and connections for me. Perez succeeds on this account, using genre, metaphor/synecdoche, and identification theories to think about how movies make their meanings and how audiences understand those meaning-making devices.

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Split into four sections, Perez (usually) starts by developing a general idea of what is going on with the area of rhetoric that he’s examining in that section then spins out from there, looking at interesting little examples and strands to explore the boundaries of the way of thinking he’s proposing. The first and last sections are a little different, with the first being an extended study of John Ford’s films to explain why rhetoric is an interesting way of studying movies and the last being a short coda looking at how identification (with characters or situations) differs from the apparatus theorists who posit an unfailing suturing into the film (identifying most with the camera) whereas Perez shows (through talking about horror) that the audience more frequently shifts their identification between different characters, situations, and camera positions throughout the film depending upon the film’s construction and their own thoughts and feelings.

In the second, and first big section, Perez discusses the idea of cinematic tropes, particularly metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche. Following structural linguist Roman Jakobson, Perez theorizes that these aren’t just tropes but “ways of making the connections of meaning,” with metaphor acting as a “way of similarity” and metonymy as a “way of contiguity” (57) Metaphor, in other words, says, look, this is like that, while metonymy says, look, this comes from that. Perez continues to develop this theory by diving into synecdoche, which takes metonymy one step further to say, look, this is part of that. He calls film a “thoroghly synecdochic medium” because every shot refers to the larger whole of the film, and therefore the study of the relationship between details (at whatever level, mise-en-scene, shot, scene, sequence) and the whole will help us understand the intended effects developed by the implied author of the film (63). I find this to be very convincing. Perez uses this understanding of how film works to walk through how political and social messages are created and transmitted through film, how characters come to stand in for ideas and how camera movements or editing can be representative of different ways of thinking.

In the third, and second big section, Perez looks at melodrama as a genre/mode that draws on the pathos part of the rhetorical triangle. He interestingly theorizes that melodrama isn’t the exact opposite of realism, as we might expect, but that they both operate as related reactions to classicism, which presents only what it needs, through excess: melodrama as an excess of emotion and subjectivity, realism as an excess of detail and objectivity. For me, this is a great way of thinking about how to classify different movies based on what they’re focused on and remove from the discussion of realism and melodrama (a pet interest of mine) some of the value judgements that have haunted them in the past. Perez spends the rest of the section teasing out how a film will create that excess of emotion through film techniques and what implications those emotional excesses have on audiences.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

I’d call this one very useful. I am very interested in merging rhetorical narrative theory with film poetics to discover why and how films make us feel and think what they do. Perez nicely explains several (though certainly not all) ways that this happens and opens some interesting doors that I’ll keep exploring as I read theory and watch films. Indeed, the area that might be most interesting to me is the one that gets the least attention from Perez, identification, so I’ll keep puzzling through what he claims here and thinking of ways of expanding upon it.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

As covered above, rhetoric, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, melodrama, identification.

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

We may think of identification as personal affinity, putting ourselves in another’s place, as when we identify with a character in a movie. But we never simply identify with a character; we identify with an action, a situation, an emotion, a motive, an interest, a point of view, something the character represents. Our identification with a character usually works together with other identifications that precede it, accompany it, modify it, complicate it. (13)

The part for the whole, the general in the particular: synecdoche is too important a figure to be subsumed under metonymy. Particulars, which are all the camera knows, are synecdochic inasmuch as they have a meaning, which is always something general. Film is a medium of particulars invested with meaning as parts of a whole. Each image on the screen shows something in particular, but something that has a place in a construction of the general. Out of the bits and pieces the camera renders, a film puts together an inclusive picture. Synecdoche is the figure of inclusion. (60)

Nothing is more important to the rhetoric of a work, to the way it affects its audience, than our sense of the author’s attitude toward the characters. (158)

Truth and beauty are goals of art as well as life, ends to be sought. But they are also means of persuasion. The best way to tell a lie is to envelop it in truth, with truth used as a means to make the lie more persuasive. That’s just what a movie does when it enacts a fiction in actual locations; the ambient reality makes the fiction more convincing. Beauty, too, serves to win us over. Usually the hero or heroine we are to side with is beautiful. Tropes gain much of their effect through the persuasion of beauty; a metaphor expresses something more forcefully because more beautifully. Often truth and beauty are looked up to as ultimate things and rhetoric is looked down on as mere deceit, but as Kiarostomi knows, truth and beauty are regular instruments of rhetoric. (196-7)

Realism is often opposed to melodrama, but both realism and melodrama are modern forms that emerged in opposition to classicism. Classicism is art that exhibits just what is necessary, the right measure of information and emotion, the perfect fit of form and meaning. Realism feels real because it exhibits more than seems necessary in the way of concrete observation, because it imparts the sense that the world exceeds our assumptions of meaning, that there are more things out there than we can account for. Both realism and melodrama are excessive relative to the norms of classicism. Realism is excessive objectively, in its representation of fact; melodrama is excessive subjectively, in its expression of emotion. Melodrama is to the inner world as realism is to the outer world. Like the inner and the outer, the subjective and the objective, melodrama and realism may be opposed but are better looked upon as complementary. (203)

A cut at once interrupts and connects, breaks off something and links it to something else, thereby having it both ways: the break that links, the fragments of modern life pieced together on the screen. Conjunctive cross-cutting, which began with Griffith’s last-minute rescues and is still going strong, takes the form of a rupture anxiously looking forward to its mending. Film is able to combine the fragmentation of a modern art with the completion of a classical art. (296)

In identifying with the camera, however, we identify not only with the visual perspective in each image but with the governing intelligence we sense behind the arrangement of images. We identify, that is, with the image maker, the implied author, which to some extent we must do in order to follow a film, just as we must identify with another person in order to engage in conversation. Our identification with characters is always part of a larger play of identification. (349)

The World Viewed by Stanley Cavell

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Citation: Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The World Viewed. Enlarged Edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
  • Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?
    • Cavell is undertaking an attempt at defining what film is, ontologically speaking, and exploring the ramifications and implications of that definition. Cavell first writes as the field of Film Studies is beginning to develop in universities (1971), and so this falls into the category of trying to set base terms for discussion and only infrequently addresses other film theorists. The World Viewed remains important in understanding some of the history of the field as well as for having developed a “theory of everything” within the film world. He addresses actors, screens, cameras, directors, sound, color, and more in trying to figure out what film affords its artists as a medium.
  • Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?
    • Cavell’s interlocutors come from two areas of study. First, his film theory predecessors, primarily Andre Bazin and Erwin Panofsky, provide Cavell with at least a few jumping off points, primarily in the areas of film’s relationship with reality. Otherwise, his interlocutors are primarily the continental philosophers that you’re used to seeing in these kinds of things: Hegel and Nietzsche, and so on. These two kinds of interlocutors make sense for his project as they come from different angles to the same question of what film is. I’ve seen Cavell referenced in other works, here and there, so his musings remain at least somewhat relevant for film theorists of today.
    • As a book written just after the collapse of the Hollywood studio system in the 1960s, there’s an interesting thread of Cavell mourning the loss of what was once great in that system while being wary of what the new way of making movies in America was starting to bring. He writes of the loss of stars like Bogart, noting that the actors of his era at the start of the 70s were less memorable or noticeable as those of the past. This historical positioning also, necessarily, limits the text. The most “modern” movie he writes about is 2001: A Space Odyessey, which means that he was writing about the movies that predated the blockbusters that are my particular area of interest.

  • Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?
    • Cavell primarily pays attention to Hollywood produced films, with reliable standards like Vertigo, Rosemary’s Baby, and Breathless getting extended analysis and smaller works like The Mortal Storm popping up here and there. These analyses are provided in support of the attempts at writing an exploration of the ontology of film. Occasionally, Cavell will take inspiration from other philosophers of art in order to explain how their theories apply (or not) to film, and in order to distinguish film from other arts.
  • Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?
    • Cavell develops his theories in what seems like fits and starts. Each chapter is relatively short, and what starts as a chapter on, say, color in film might end up as a musing about time and futurity. This makes Cavell’s overall motive and progression of ideas somewhat difficult to parse. Luckily, he provides a pretty solid rundown in his final chapter. Cavell states that film is both of and outside the world, reality, and it is because film presents a viewing of reality (as constructed as it may be) without us in it that we are drawn to it. He claims several times that films waken us from our own subjectivities by showing us something that is outside that subjectivity, and in this way it reveals reality to us, even if that reality is not a full or complete reality because it is necessarily limited by the frame and time.
  • Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?
    • While this text is a little more philosophical than where my usual areas of interest lie in the mechanics and mechanisms of films themselves, I always appreciate reading through another person’s developed perspectives on a medium that I love so much. I found in it many passages that spoke to things I’ve only thought in nascent ways, and that’s often a helpful thing for me. I also appreciate it as a way of understanding “reality” as separate from a naturalistic, Bazinian understanding of filmic “realism.” Here reality doesn’t need to be quotidian or only natural in origin, but is understood as being infinite in its permutations.
    • It is a bit difficult to get through and parse, and Cavell could have been more cognizant of the differences that inflect audience response to films (race, gender, class, so on). He’s got a major case of the universal audience member, one that he pretty directly says is himself. I’m always wary of that.
  • Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?
    • Key terms: realism, automatism, fantasies, subjective, photography, stars
  • Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

So far as photography satisfied a wish, it satisfied a wish not confined to painters, but the human wish, intensifying in the West since the Reformation, to escape subjectivity and metaphysical isolation–a wish for the power to reach this world, having for so long tried, at last hopelessly, to manifest fidelity to another. (21)

After The Maltese Falcon we know a new star, only distantly a person. “Bogart” means “the figure created in a given set of films.” His presence in those films is who he is, not merely in the sense in which a photograph of an event is that event; but in the sense that if those films did not exist, Bogart would not exist, the name “Bogart” would not mean what it does. The figure it names is not only in our presence, we are in his, in the only sense we could ever be. That is all the “presence” he has. (28)

Works that do provide me with pleasure or a knowledge of the way things are equally provide me with a sense of the artist’s position toward this revelation – a position, say, of complete conviction, of compassion, of delight or ironic amusement, of longing or scorn or rage or loss. The fact is, an artist, because a human being, does have a position and does have his reasons for calling his events to our attention. What entitles him to our attention is precisely his responsibility to this condition. (98)

Viewing a movie makes this condition automatic, takes the responsibility for it out of our hands. Hence movies seem more natural than reality. Not because they are escapes into fantasy, but because they are reliefs from private fantasy and its responsibilities; from the fact that the world is already drawn by fantasy. And not because they are dreams, but because they permit the self to be wakened, so that we may stop withdrawing our longings further inside ourselves. Movies convince us of the world’s reality in the only way we have to be convinced, without learning to bring the world closer to the heart’s desire (which in practice now means learning to stop altering it illegitimately, against itself): by taking views of it. (102)

Reproducing the world is the only thing film does automatically. (103)

Film takes our very distance and powerlessness over the world as the condition of the world’s natural appearance. It promises the exhibition of the world in itself. This is its promise of candor: that what it reveals is entirely what is revealed to it, that nothing revealed by the world in its presence is lost. (119)

Major and Minor Fields

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As I wrote about a little in the reading list post, your reading list will depend upon what your major and minor fields are. Here at OSU’s English department, you’re required to have one major field and at least one minor field. You can have two minor fields, though it feels like a lot more work for very little additional payoff, so I avoided that. Here at OSU, you’re also required to justify/explain your major and minor fields and what interests you about them, so for the sake of transparency and helping people who might be in the same position, I’m going to put my justifications here as well. Hope they’re useful for you.

Major Field Description: Post-70 U.S. Film and Television

My major field of study is Post-70 Film and Television, with a strong emphasis on blockbuster films and big budget series. These films and shows are not only the primary tentpoles for the industry during this period, but also the types of films and shows that become touchstones within and instigators of broader cultural conversations. They are also examples of storytelling pitched to the largest possible audience through what Hollywood largely considered as the default character and audience identity of the straight white cis-gendered male. Blockbusters highlighted technological filmmaking advancements (surround sound, digital editing, CGI, etc), the combination of which is fascinating in its implications for both how the films are made and why they are received the way they are by audiences. Of course alongside the rise of the blockbuster spectacular, there’s a strong independent tradition that thrives in the 1970s and continues somewhat diminished into the present (and from which some blockbusters like Halloween and The Terminator emerge); these films on my list provide important examples of alternate storytelling and scale-of-production possibilities. Though my focus is primarily on Hollywood film and television, I have included some examples from outside its boundaries in order to capture a range of other filmmaking (and television-making) techniques that often are eventually subsumed into Hollywood’s blockbuster style, like Spike Lee’s expansive scope in Do the Right Thing that gives the supporting cast space to be fuller characters than were previously allowed in Hollywood’s pragmatist cinematic form, not to mention its attention to characters and audiences that Hollywood had largely ignored in its general myopic concentration on whiteness. Although Hollywood is and has been dominated by white male voices, I also tried to be inclusive of films that had strong input by women and people of color where possible. Broadening beyond the auteurist understanding of single authorship of a film or tv show allows movies like Star Wars (with Maria Lucas’ editing) and shows like Veronica Mars (with Kristen Bell’s central performance) to be strong representatives of female voices in filmmaking alongside more traditional examples like Julie Dash’s direction of Daughters of the Dust and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s showrunning for Fleabag.

My list of secondary sources is populated with a mix of canonical film theory books and essays as well as representative writings on areas of particular interest to my focus on big budget, highly-leveraged film and television in the post-studio era. I consider myself to be, at least partially, a formalist, so Eisenstein, McLuhan, Bordwell, and Bazin (among others) are foundational texts for me. I am also, however, deeply interested in audience studies and spectator theory, an area that Jenkins, Lewis, and Staiger help illuminate. The history of film and film theory is significant to my major field, since I am bracketing a half century defined by the collapse of the classical studio system and the rise of radically new economic structures and film technologies in production, distribution, and exhibition; Carroll, Barnouw, Rodowick, Langford, and Connor will help me better contextualize the way that the current moment has come to be via industrial and technological changes over recent history. Following Richard Dyer, I am also interested in how Hollywood has constructed an overbearing whiteness as the often-understudied default position from which it tells its stories. So many of the movies and shows on my list are about whiteness without acknowledging that fact, and that phenomenon is one I am keen to study more.

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Minor Field Description: Narrative Theory and Seriality Studies

My minor field is in narratology with an emphasis on serialization in film and television. To get as broad an understanding as the field as is possible, I’ve selected some general overviews as well as some standout texts within important subfields (rhetorical narratology, natural and unnatural narratology). With that background, I then focused on serialization in film and television, an until recently underrepresented subfield within narratology. Here I have quite a few studies of television serialization, but, with a few exceptions, little on modern film serialization because not much has yet been written on that subject except for by writers like Locke and Verevis. Writers like Higgins have, however, investigated the world of early film serials. I hope to eventually combine the knowledge from this tv-heavy serialization theory with the more generalized film theory from my major field to create a deeper understanding of how film and tv narratives can operate serially. This will be a crucial part of my dissertation research, as I aim to write primarily about film sequels that were made long after the original films were in theaters. Seriality studies often looks to the way a show balances the serialized/episodic tendencies in relation to the show as a whole, while film studies—when it has analyzed seriality in its medium—usually looks at it primarily as an opportunity to continue a story/world that has been successful (commercially or critically) in the past. I think each of these foci have something to bring to each other, and I think the extreme length of time between films in the movies I’m interested in can call attention to the function gaps play in the aforementioned aspects of serialized filmic/televisual storytelling. To that end, I have populated my primary sources with various kinds of serialized storytelling in film and television. Many of the examples take an original film from my major field list and match it with that franchise’s latest entry, while others have a self-contained serial form, like Moonlight and Boyhood or Russian Doll.

Reading List: What it is, what’s on it

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If you’re coming across this blog in your search for reading lists to help you make your own, chances are you won’t need this explanation of what they are, so feel free to skip right down to the meat of this post. For friends and family members who read this without knowing the ins and outs of getting a PhD in the humanities/English/film/cultural studies, here’s a quick breakdown of what a reading list is and why it is important:

A reading list is, in large part, what it sounds like. You make a list of a whole bunch of books, movies, and tv shows that should combine to give you a solid grounding in the area of focus you’ve decided on (more on that in a different post). This means you’re likely picking the so-called canonical works, the big important things that people have heard of. But you’re also trying to balance what has been considered “important” by previous scholars with what you find important for your future in addition to trying to fill in the gaps of what has largely been left out of your field in the past. For much of the humanities, this means you’re giving some extra attention to aspects of race, gender, and sexuality that have been pushed to the side by the scholars who have come before you. After all, blindly following the mistakes of the past is, you know, bad. To that end, you also need to think about time. I leaned towards newer scholarship when compiling my reading list because my area of interest is something that is still ongoing and it is important to read what people are saying about it right now. That might not be as important to other scholars, so you have to think about your project and what it is important to know.

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Of course, even though it is called a reading list, that doesn’t mean that there’s only books on it. In English PhD programs or other fields where primary sources (works that you’re studying (fiction, films, tv shows), rather than the secondary sources which are usually books about those primary sources, AKA dry academic texts) include filmed media, you’ll want to think about if it is important to include some film or television on your reading list. In my case, where my primary and secondary fields of study are both concentrated on film and television, I don’t have any textual fiction on my “reading” list, it is instead full of fiction (and one documentary!) films and shows. In standard English areas of study where you’d read primarily fiction texts for your primary sources, you’d also have a much higher proportion of those kinds of texts than I do. In the pop culture subfields like mine, there’s still apparently some skepticism about whether we’re as rigorous as the other fields and so we must prove our mettle by reading much more secondary sources than other fields need to. It’s bullshit, basically, but that’s why my reading list is about 50/50 primary and secondary texts.

My primary field is about as narrow as you’re allowed to get, at least here at OSU, so I was able to curate the kinds of movies that ended up on my list a bit more than normal. Often, absurdly, one is required to declare all of film or television studies as their primary field, and are therefore obliged to cram the entire history of filmed media onto a list that, at most, can be about 40 texts long. That’s silly. Looking over others’ example lists in this field shows that there’s a heavy preference towards the older end of film history, with things petering out pretty strongly by the time you get to the 90s and 2000s. Since my area of interest (legacyquels) don’t really appear as such until ~2008, this kind of list would be… detrimental. As such, my list only goes from 1970 to the present and leans towards the large blockbuster productions that the legacyquels have been part of. You’ll notice a fun trick I did where I put the first film of a series that had a legacyquel in my primary field reading list and then the legacyquel in my more specialized secondary field list. 1 for the price of 2! The problem is that there aren’t many films in my area of study that aren’t created by straight cis white guys, so I had to get my share of diverse creators (probably not enough, in fact) around the edges of my reading list. More on that in my next post about my major and minor fields.

I think that’s enough rambling. I’ll also use this post as an index and link every post I do for an individual entry on this list to the corresponding text here. So if you’re interested in what I have to say about one of these texts, just click on the link to it. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to comment on this post and I’ll answer when I can. You can also find me on twitter @beneclasedu, and you can ask me there if you find this list years after the fact and I no longer have access to the OSU login that I’m using to host this site. Without further ado, here’s the list(s):

Major Field: Post-70 Film and Television

Primary Sources (Film)

  1. John Cassavetes, A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
  2. Chantal Akerman, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975)
  3. Steven Spielberg, Jaws (1975)
  4. John G. Avildsen, Rocky (1976)
  5. Martin Scorsese, Taxi Driver (1976)
  6. George Lucas, Star Wars (1977)
  7. John Carpenter, Halloween (1978)
  8. Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now (1979)
  9. George Miller, Mad Max (1979)
  10. Steven Spielberg, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
  11. Ridley Scott, Blade Runner (1982)
  12. David Cronenberg, Videodrome (1983)
  13. James Cameron, The Terminator (1984)
  14. Spike Lee, Do the Right Thing (1989)
  15. Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust (1991)
  16. Jonathan Demme, The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
  17. John Singleton, Boyz n the Hood (1991)
  18. Edward James Olmos, American Me (1992)
  19. Richard Linklater, Before Sunrise (1995)
  20. Wes Craven, Scream (1996)
  21. Lana and Lilly Wachowski, The Matrix (1999)
  22. Peter Jackson, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
  23. Jane Campion, In the Cut (2002)
  24. Hayao Miyazaki, Spirited Away (2002)
  25. Brad Bird, The Incredibles (2004)
  26. Guillermo del Toro, Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
  27. Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood (2007)
  28. Quentin Tarantino, Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2009)
  29. Joss Whedon, The Avengers (2012)
  30. Luca Guadagnino, Call Me by Your Name (2017)
  31. Jordan Peele, Get Out (2017)

Primary Sources (Television)

  1. Ingmar Bergman, Fanny and Alexander (1983, 5 episodes)
  2. David Lynch and Mark Frost, Twin Peaks (1990-91, 30 episodes)
  3. David Milch, Deadwood (2004-06, 30 episodes)
  4. Rob Thomas, Veronica Mars (2004-06, 64 episodes)
  5. Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, Lost (2004-10, 121 episodes)
  6. Dave Filoni, Star Wars: Clone Wars (2009-2014, 121 episodes)
  7. Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fleabag (2018-19)

Secondary Sources

  1. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935)
  2. Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962” (1962)
  3. Stuart Hall & Paddy Whannel, The Popular Arts (2018)
  4. Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message (1968)
  5. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (1969)
  6. Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies 3rd Edition (2016)
  7. Manthia Diawara, “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance” (1975)
  8. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975)
  9. David Bordwell, “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice” (1979)
  10. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (1979)
  11. Seymour Chatman, “What Novels Can Do that Films Can’t (and Vice Versa)” (1980)
  12. Noël Carroll, “The Future of Allusion: Hollywood in the Seventies (And Beyond)” (1982)
  13. Erik Barnouw, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television 2nd Edition (1990)
  14. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992)
  15. Lisa A. Lewis, The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (1992)
  16. Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (1993)
  17. Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (1997)
  18. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999)
  19. Janet Staiger, Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception (2000)
  20. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (2001)
  21. Charles Ramírez Berg, Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, and Resistance (2002)
  22. Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Its Cultural Forms (2003)
  23. Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema Vol. 1 (2004)
  24. Jason Mittell, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (2004)
  25. Peter Kramer, “Big Pictures: Studying Contemporary Hollywood Cinema through Its Greatest Hits (2005)
  26. Janet McCabe, Feminist Film Studies: Writing the Woman into Cinema (2005)
  27. Cornel Sandvoss, Fans, the Mirror of Consumption (2005)
  28. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006)
  29. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (2007)
  30. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2008)
  31. Michel Chion, Film, A Sound Art (2009)
  32. Jason Mittell, Television and American Culture (2009)
  33. Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (2010)
  34. Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale, Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History (2010)
  35. Barry Langford, Post-Classical Hollywood: Film Industry, Style and Ideology Since 1945 (2010)
  36. Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (2011)
  37. Amy Holdsworth, Television, Memory, and Nostalgia (2011)
  38. Victoria O’Donnell, Television Criticism (2012)
  39. Caetlin Benson-Allott, Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing (2013)
  40. Ruby Rich, New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut (2013)
  41. Gerald Sim, The Subject of Film and Race: Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema (2014)
  42. D. Connor, The Studios after the Studios: Neoclassical Hollywood (2015)
  43. Matt Yockey, Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe (2017)
  44. Gilberto Perez, The Eloquent Screen: A Rhetoric of Film (2019)
  45. Sean Guynes, Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics (2020)
  46. Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell, How to Watch Television (2020)

 

Secondary Field: Narratology (focus on serialization)

Primary Sources (Film)

  1. David Lynch, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992)
  2. Steve Miner, Halloween H20 (1998)
  3. Richard Linklater, Before Sunset (2004)
  4. Wes Craven, Scream 4 (2011)
  5. Richard Linklater, Before Midnight (2013)
  6. Richard Linklater, Boyhood (2014)
  7. George Miller, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
  8. Ryan Coogler, Creed (2015)
  9. J. Abrams, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
  10. Barry Jenkins, Moonlight (2016)
  11. Dennis Villeneuve, Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
  12. David Gordon Green, Halloween (2018)
  13. Anthony and Joe Russo, Avengers: Endgame (2019)
  14. Tim Miller, Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

Primary Sources (Television)

  1. The Up Series (1964-2019, 9 episodes/films)
  2. David Lynch, Twin Peaks: The Return (2017, 18 episodes)
  3. David Milch, Deadwood (2019, 1 movie)
  4. Rob Thomas, Veronica Mars (2019, 8 episodes)
  5. Natasha Lyonne, Amy Poehler, and Leslye Headland, Russian Doll (2019, 8 episodes)
  6. Dave Filoni, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2020, 12 episodes)

Secondary Sources

  1. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1983) !
  2. Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (1990)
  3. Lubomír Doležel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (2000)
  4. Kristen Thompson, Storytelling in Film and Television (2003)
  5. David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It (2006)
  6. Michael Z. Newman, “From Beats to Arcs: Toward a Poetics of Television Narrative” (2006)
  7. Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin, Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (2009)
  8. Carolyn Jess-Cooke and Constantine Verevis, Second Takes: Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel (2010)
  9. Monika Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (2010)
  10. Ruth Page and Bronwen Thomas, New Narratives: Stories and Storytelling in the Digital Age (2011)
  11. David Herman, James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol, Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates (2012)
  12. Kathleen Loock and Constantine Verevis, Film Remakes, Adaptations, and Fan Productions: Remake/Remodel (2012)
  13. Carolyn Jess-Cooke, Film Sequels (2012)
  14. Jason Mittell, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (2015)
  15. Lee Goldberg, Television Fast Forward: Sequels & Remakes of Cancelled Series (2015)
  16. Robin Warhol, “Binge Watching: How Netflix Original Programs are Changing Serial Form” (2016)
  17. Scott Higgins, Matinee Melodrama: Playing with Formula in the Sound Serial (2016)
  18. James Phelan, Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative (2017)
  19. Frank Kelleter, Media of Serial Narrative (2017)
  20. Brian Richardson, A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-First Century: Theorizing Unruly Narratives (2019)
  21. Jan Alber and Brian Richardson, Unnatural Narratology: Extensions, Revisions, and Challenges (2020)

PhD Exam Reading Questions

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I’m hoping that by titling these posts with what I searched as I looked for these kinds of things I can help future students who are also in search of these kinds of things.

These came to me via a friend who got them from another friend who got them from Cindy Selfe and Laura Allen, both of whom work in the R(hetoric)C(omposition)L(iteracy) department here at OSU. I’ve not met either of them in person, at least not more than in passing, but I am grateful to them for their wonderful questions that translate pretty well to other disciplines. I also won’t commit to answering all of these questions in every post or for every reading, but I will try to answer the ones that seem important for whatever reading I’ll be writing about. I’ll use these questions as an outline to format each reading-specific post.

With that, here’s the list of questions

Reading Questions (with thanks to Cindy Selfe, Laura Allen)

  1. Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?
  2. Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?
  3. Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?
  4. Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?
  5. Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?
  6. Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?
  7. Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

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Exams: A New Hope

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Hi, I’m a Ph.D. student at THE Ohio State University studying legacyquels (more on that later, I’m sure) in film and television. I’m starting this blog as a way of tracking and holding myself accountable to the reading I’ll need to do in the time before the (tentatively scheduled) December 2020 exam date. There’s a lot of reading and writing to be done in that time, so I’ll be doing at least the latter part here so that I can hold myself accountable to doing the reading and synthesizing what I’ve read/watched.

In the near future, look for a post with my reading list, as well as a description of my major and minor fields. Those will hopefully be useful to those who come looking here for a film and tv studies reading list for their PhD programs in the future. I looked at a few of these kinds of sites myself as I developed these lists, so I hope I can repay that to whomever may come after me.

The majority of post on this page will be me trying to make sense of what I’ve read recently. I’ll aim, for now, at posting 3x a week, roughly every other day. That’s a lot of posting, but it should be relatively short posts that synthesize what I’ve read in that book and begin to connect them to other readings or texts. If you’re a family member looking to support me in this endeavor, I’d appreciate any clarification questions you might have about what you read here. The way you learn best is by teaching others, so I’d welcome the opportunity to explain what I’ve written differently. If you’re a friend or colleague looking in on what I’m reading and something you’ve read jumps out to you as a cool or interesting connection, please let me know about that as well! We’re all in this together, as I’ve heard some young people sing inside a high school gym. Here goes nothing.

via GIPHY