CMS 480 B: Senior Capstone

This senior capstone course is designed with two purposes in mind: first, it will introduce a range of approaches to writing about U.S. cinema and media, with an emphasis on the diversity of scholarly and creative writing practices available to critics working in this field; and, second, it will be a writing workshop where you can develop a final seminar paper or capstone project. The assumption at the outset of the course is that you have already completed a wide range of cinema and media studies courses and that you’ve been exposed to various theories and methodologies in the discipline. This course will ask you to develop a single project throughout the ten-week quarter, and it will therefore emphasize depth and detail rather than breadth or coverage of a field. We will also watch a series of films grouped together under the themes of “at home” and “on the road,” and we will use the course meetings to brainstorm and work through the process of writing about cinema, with those films as our examples and the reading on the syllabus as models.