LFU:online

The course is intended to familiarize students with the relationship between media and culture by exploring a variety of historical and theoretical approaches to mediating mountains. 

This seminar explores landscape aesthetics by looking at mediations of mountains across different cultures and media. How and where do mountains feature in the cinematic imagination of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? How do mountain movies negotiate romantic and modernist conceptions of mountains? What cultural, national and gender politics have been projected onto mountains? How do video gaming change and challenge cultural conceptions of mountains and landscape aesthetics in general? We will examine a wide range of mountain media that include early film travelogues form the silent period, classical German mountain movies, US Westerns, recent Chinese action films (e.g. The Taking of the Tiger, Tsui Hark 2014) and cinematic mountain symphonies (e.g. Mountain, Jennifer Peedom 2017) as well as video games such as David O’Reilly Mountain (2014) and Getting Over it with Bennett Foddy (2017).  

The seminar is organized in conjunction with an international conference on Mediating Mountains (Nov. 22–24, 2019) that brings together mountain and film scholars: http://bit.do/aaas19

Presentations, discussions, reading and writing assignments.

Active participation, presentation, research paper/response paper.

Prerequisite for the Master Program (812): none
The Teacher Training Program (Lehramtsstudium: 344): completed first part of studies

The seminar "SE American Film, Media and Culture I" can be attended as the "SE American Literature and Culture II". If you wish to obtain credits for both seminars, the seminars' contents must differ substantially.

For the Diploma Program (Diplomstudium: 343): SE2: American Literature/Culture, for the Teacher Training Program (Lehramtsstudium: 344): SE2: American Literature and Culture.

Due to substantial differences in the allocation of ECTS-Credits in various curricula (teacher training program - BA/MA English and American Studies), the requirements for this course vary. Information will be provided by the instructor at the beginning of the course.