Learning Outcomes:
• Use theoretical concepts from Linda Williams and other relevant scholars of the body genres to critically analyse films of those genres
• Write scholarly analysis of what scholarship on the body genres can tell us about individual films
• Analyse how the aesthetics of genre films demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of scholarship on the genres
• Apply genre theory to original arguments about films
Indicative Module Content:
Indicative readings:
Linda Williams, ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,’ Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991):
2–13.
Rick Altman, ‘A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,’ in Film Genre Reader IV,
ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 27–41.
Adam Lowenstein, Horror Film and Otherness (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022).
David Scott Diffrient, Body Genre: Anatomy of the Horror Film (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2023).
Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018).
Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Jonathan Goldberg, Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
Aaron Kerner and Jonathan L. Knapp, Extreme Cinema: Affective Strategies in Transnational Media (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016).
Indicative screenings:
Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002)
Two Days, One Night (Deux jours, une nuit, Luc and Jeanne Pierre Dardenne, 2014)
Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005)
The Fifth Reaction (Vakonesh-e Panjom, Tahmineh Milani, 2003)
It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014)
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014)
Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)
Blue Is the Warmest Colour (La vie d'Adèle, Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013)
Stranger By the Lake (L'inconnu du lac, Alain Guiraudie, 2013)
Y tu mamá también (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001)