Comparative Media

4.0 credits

What can we learn from comparing different mediums to one another? In this course, we will examine two or more mediums to understand how they converge and diverge, which has become an urgent task in a digital world in which all media are reduced to “content.” Do moving-image media—film, television, video, animation, gaming—work in different ways aesthetically and emotionally than mediums such as painting, sculpture, comics, printmaking, and/or photography? How has the rise of cinema and television affected how novels are written? How do adaptations navigate the relationship between mediums, and what are the different ways in which one medium represents—or remediates—another medium within itself? By engaging with such questions, this course offers students the chance to explore the distinctive affordances of a range of media, and to think about the degree to which what we express is influenced by how we express it.