With the recent release of Todd Hayne's Far from Heaven and Denzel
Washington's Antwone Fisher, critics have been discussing the rebirth
of melodrama. Far From Heaven is a conscious remake of the classic
1950s women's films by director Douglas Sirk, while Antwone Fisher
rekindles the male version of melodrama–often referred to as the "male
weepy"–through a lens focused on race. While these and other films may
be particularly visible representations of melodrama today, in truth,
melodrama has never left the cultural stage. Not only do melodramas of
all sorts define film and television productions, as well as literary
works, melodrama is arguably the most pervasive of all genres, present
in a range of diverse texts, from animation to war films and Westerns.
Genres that are otherwise worlds apart from the "tales of sound and
fury" told by melodrama use its structures, strategies, and concerns
to create and sustain affect, emotional resonance, and audience
involvement.

This course will introduce students to the major writings on melodrama
in film and television studies, examining the place that the genre has
occupied in the development of genre theory and criticism since the
1970s. Melodrama has had a particularly close relationship to feminist
theory and criticism, gay and lesbian studies, and race studies. As
films in the genre investigate issues having to do with the family,
gender, sexuality, and race within explicitly tumultuous and/or
repressive social circumstances, melodrama appears to such cultural
critics as a genre especially well-suited to an exploration of the
relationship between the media and identity politics. As the themes of
Far From Heaven and Antoine Fisher indicate, melodrama is often
concerned with crises that ensue when apparently orderly societies
meet the disorderly protagonists of the genre, particularly as these
protagonists force questions of femininity and female desire, male
desire and homosexuality, and the place of racial "others" to the
foreground.

We will consider the historical development of film melodrama from
literary and theatrical traditions through the various forms that
defined its high points in cinema and television, from Victorian
melodramas to variations comprised by the family melodrama, the
woman's film, the Gothic, the race film, the television soap opera,
and the "male weepie." We will screen films by some of the central
classic directors of melodrama, including D.W. Griffith, Max Ophuls,
and the "Holy Trinity" of Douglas Sirk, Vincente Minnelli, and
Nicholas Ray, as well as recent work by directors such as Haynes and
Jane Campion. While Hollywood and independent productions will occupy
an important place in our studies of the genre, we will also analyze
the circulation of melodrama internationally in such nations as
Germany and China/Hong Kong. Ultimately, we will consider the
manifestations of melodrama that occur in other media worlds,
including reality TV and high-profile news events such as the O.J.
Simpson trial.

Among scholars we will read are: Peter Brooks, Laura Mulvey, Thomas
Elsaesser, Mary Ann Doane, Linda Williams, Tania Modleski, Robert
Allen, Lea Jacobs, E. Ann Kaplan, and Ben Singer. Assignments will
include a class presentation, a short conference-style paper, and a
seminar paper.

(Students may also sign up under Cultural Studies and American Studies
course numbers.)