Make a small monster film, and complete this Ivy League course.
Students will be preparing a 10-minute picture in accordance with a fresh Princeton University course this fall that will feature students studying villain movies.
A student’s course outline for” Making the Vampire Film” states that students may create a brief narrative monster picture, a picture writing about one of the monster movies that will be shown in class, and an abstract/conceptual/experimental/self-reflexive art film that riffs on the idea of the vampire.
They can do this by “re-editing ] scenes from existing films into a narrative about vampires with fabricated sound design and narration.”
Students will learn works like” Vampire Sex,”” Filming Dracula,” and” The Visual Spectacle of Vampirism.” The Office of the Registrar provides an in-depth outline of the program, which appears on the fall offerings at the Lewis Center for the Arts.
Christopher Harris instructs the group. What should students take away from the program, according to two contacted comments received in the last month? Related comments made by The Lewis Center in the last month were not answered.
According to the author’s college profile, Harris “makes pictures and videos installations that read African American literature through the poetics and aesthetics of empirical cinema.”
A program that combines movie and the idea of prison eradication is now being taught by Harris.
The coercive machinery, which includes the structure of police, prisons, prosecutors, parole boards, prison guards, probation officers, etc., and the commercial/industrial visual apparatus, which generally has valorized and naturalized dominant constructions of crime and punishment for common consumption, will be examined in this course, according to the description.
In emailed comments to The Fix, a higher education expert who co-wrote a book about Ivy League courses criticized the class.
According to Madison Doan,” Parents, students, taxpayers, and university leaders have a responsibility to examine whether courses like this actually help a student develop their intellectual capacity, civic engagement, and workforce preparation.” Is the course frivolous or focusing more on pop culture, or is it creating new knowledge and encouraging analytical thought?
She just published a book called” Slacking,” which explores the positive and negative aspects of Ivy League classes.
Courses like this appear wasteful, offering little practical value in preparing students for a career after college, she said, adding that tuition at Princeton is around$ 62, 000 a year and many students are likely relying on loans to finance their education.
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Doan contends that the issue does not stop at” Making the Vampire Film.”
The lack of a rigorous core set of classes that students must take to graduate is a pressing issue facing Ivy League students.
According to Doan,” the absence of a core curriculum with a clear vision of what a well-rounded or academically rigorous education looks like can make it simple for an undergraduate to leave college with what the American Council of Trustees and Alumni refer to as” thin and patchy education,” with no guarantee that they have mastered a core set of facts or skills,”
Doan claimed that Princeton students have far more diverse options.
Students should think about enrolling in other Princeton courses to fulfill their literature and the arts requirements, such as” What is a Classic?” Doan said,” Shakespeare: Toward Hamlet” or” Studies in Medieval Italian Literature and Culture: Writing Latin in Late Medieval Italy.”
She claimed that” these courses would help develop interpretive abilities, cultural literacy, and deep engagement with foundational texts.”
According to Doan,” Literature courses that emphasize close reading, augmentation, and analysis will help students interpret complex texts, question assumptions, and develop evidence-based insights.”
Not only is Princeton the only university that offers a course on vampire movies.
According to a report from The Fix, the University of Florida English department held a class called” Vampire Cinema” last fall.
Students were given research topics like “queer, gay, and lesbian vampires” and “violent and psychoanalysis” in the course.
MORE: Professors create a new nonsense academic field:” Feminist witch studies”
A vampire, Ollyy/Shutterstock, and IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT
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