Goals

This course will:

• Introduce you to a range of media texts, including film, television, and digital media from different decades and cultural/industry contexts.
• Provide you with tools and vocabulary to analyze the formal elements of cinema, television, and digital media.
• Foster a deeper understandings of the strategies described by the vocabulary of media analysis and their impact on audience engagement.
• Offer hands on experience with the production of media meaning, both to encourage you to explore their you and to help solidify the theoretical and formal tools explored in class.
• Guide you in the writing of media analysis, with focus on linking close formal analysis with larger questions of authorship, industry, audience, and cultural analysis.
• Challenge you to consider the significance of media forms and media representation in culture.

Outcomes

This course will give you the tools to:

• Assess and analyze formal and thematic elements of media texts, drawing on the vocabulary of film analysis as well as theoretical tools such as semiotics, narrative analysis, and ideological theory.
• Produce nuanced analyses of media engagement, spectatorship, and cultural identity.
• Evaluate and contribute to debates on the cultural relevance and impact of media representations, medium specificity, and media criticism.
• Interrogate the omnipresent media technologies and media representations in contemporary culture, informed by a sense of their inner-workings, historical trajectories, and cultural significance.
• Approach media production informed by the tools of media analysis and vice versa.