Course Description

For as long as there have been people, we have defined ourselves--who we are as individuals and together, what actions are good and bad, how we ought to relate to each other--primarily through the stories we tell. The way we told those stories changed in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries with the rise of printed books and general literacy. It changed again in the twentieth century with the development of the motion picture, which made the impact of the stories larger than life, decreased our participation in the construction of both the stories and their meaning, and made the whole thing--even more than it had been with books--into an industry. Television spread the moving image everywhere.

This course is an introduction to the moral vocabulary of American movies, along with a discussion of how this vocabulary goes together to create (or maybe just impose) a sense of who we are and what we should be. We will not watch the movies and TV that are now doing the dirty work, but we will watch many of the movies that the people who are making today's stuff watched (and continue to watch) to learn how to do it. The movies above range from very good to great (there are, at least, four legitimate contenders for best American film ever on the list).

Films

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