This seminar aims to give you an overview of the history of the American
romantic comedy – from early silent film entries and the Golden Age in
the 1930s and 1940s to the later successful cycles of the 1990s and
2000s, to the genre’s eventual decline and possible re-emergence. We
will examine how romantic comedy has continuously acted as a seismograph
for changing social mores around issues of gender and sexuality, but
also of class and race, and how the genre’s aesthetic pleasures have
both served as an agent of dominant hegemonic power and subverted it.
Three of the seminar sessions are reserved for film screenings.
contact: maria.odoevskaya@gmail.com
- Dozent/in: Maria Odoevskaya