400

Honors:  Utopia & its Discontents

Professor Michael Sayeau

TTh      12:30 - 1:50

Registration through the Undergraduate Office

413

Film Directors

Professor Bruce Jackson

Professor Diane Christian

Tuesdays        7:00 - 9:40

Reg. No. 003525

Centered on texts of the twentieth-century, this honors seminar will explore the long history of works--from the book of Genesis to a novel written in the wake of 9/11--that propose images of utterly perfect or intractably imperfect worlds. Utopian and dystopian writing is an index of the hopes and fears of humanity. Through the close analysis and wider contextualization of such works, we will engage with the rules and conventions of utopian and dystopian texts as a literary genre. What sort of story can we tell about a world that is ostensibly perfect? What is it about the literary and historical atmosphere of the last century that has made it impossible to write a utopia? In particular, what light does the close consideration of this body of work shed on the practice of literary criticism and its relationship to politics as we know it today? 

 

Of particular interest will be works that would not necessarily be categorized as "utopias" or "dystopias," but which contain traces of either (or both!) situations. 

 

We will likely read works by Aristotle, More, Morris, Wells, Freud, Benjamin, Orwell, Zamyatin, Atwood, Le Guin, Jameson, Coetzee, Gibson and many others. 

This class is an experiment in looking at and talking about films.   It’s a regular UB class, but the general public is welcome to  attend.  We meet in the Market Arcade Film and Art Center in downtown  Buffalo on Tuesday nights.  (There’s a well-lighted, monitored, free parking lot directly opposite the theater’s Washington Street  entrance.  The theater is directly opposite Metrorail’s Theater  District station.)

 

The two of us introduce each film, we screen it, we take a short  break, and then we talk about the film with the students and anyone  in the audience who wants to join us.  The non-student part of the  audience has been running over 200 people for each screening, about  half of whom stay for the discussions.

 

The Buffalo Film Seminars are grounded in two underlying  assumptions.  The first is that watching a good film on a television set is like reading a good novel in Cliff’s Notes or Classic Comics:  you may get the contour of the story but not the experience of the work.  Movies were meant to be seen big, in the company of other  people.  The second is that a conversation among people of various ages and experiences about a good movie they’ve all just seen can be  interesting and useful.

 

We try to pick films that will let us think and talk about genre,  writing, narrative, editing, directing, acting, context, camera work, relation to sources.  The only fixed requirement is that they have to  be great films--no films of "academic" interest only.  You can go to  www.buffalofilmseminars.com for the latest information on the  schedule, as well as a full list of all the films we’ve programmed in  the first fourteen series, and other information about the screenings  and the class.

 

 

 

 

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