INI 423F counts towards Specialist, Major or Minor programmes in Cinema Studies.

Sparked significantly by feminist interest in melodrama as a form centred around and addressed to women, in the last twenty-five years there has been a resurgence of critical interest in the mode. In the present, there is a veritable cultural industry of studies in melodrama, informed by Peter Brooks' theories of its non-verbal elements, the 'moral occult' of its world-view and the emphasis on the body as the principal site of signification. Psychoanalytic, Marxist, feminist and post-colonial rubrics have been brought to bear on its study. Whether viewed as an essentially democratic form that elevates the humble of the world to centrality (as Brooks does), as a bourgeois form that confirms the status quo of capitalist patriarchy (as many feminists do), or as a self-referencing and intertextualizing form raising postmodernist questions of enunciation and address, melodrama has taken its place as a nodal form for ideological critique.

This course will study the principal theoretical approaches to cinematic melodrama along with illustrative cinematic texts from the history of cinema. Films will include examples from Hollywood (both silent and sound era) and from around the world.

Written texts will include articles from recently published anthologies and excerpts from selected books.

This is a seminar and discussion course. Reading the assigned texts and participating in class discussions will be essential to the course. Films will be screened every week.