Instructor: Weissman | WF 11:00 AM- 12:20 PM
What is fascism, and how have literary works and films represented and responded to it? In this course we will examine a variety of written and visual depictions of fascism from the early twentieth century to the present, with a primary focus on the 1930s and 1940s. Literary and cinematic works will be read and viewed alongside historical and theoretical accounts of fascism, fascist politics, and fascists aesthetics. Our engagement with diverse texts — imaginative fiction, memoir, essays, animated shorts, documentary and dramatic film — will allow us to explore ways in which filmmaking and literary writing have been used to document, decipher, resist, and serve authoritarian power and political violence.