Announcing a course for Fall 2002

Communication Arts & Sciences 515

Seminar in the Rhetoric of Narrative Film

Tom Benson

This course will offer an intensive examination of the art of Alfred Hitchcock, one of the great film artists of the twentieth century.

Each week, the class will screen one or more of Hitchcock’s classic films. The class will then meet in small discussion sections for intensive analysis of the films and a series of related readings. Our discussions and readings will explore Hitchcock as one of Hollywood’s most successful popular entertainers, the "master of suspense"; as one of the great artists of the medium; as a critic of American culture; and as a persona whose reputation is a construction of his own efforts, and the product of reviewers and academic critics.

For students of film culture, Hitchcock is certainly worth studying in his own right, and in this sense his films are the primary text of the course. But to leave it at that would make this a more specialized seminar than many graduate students could afford to take in their effort to master a broad area of advanced study. Hence, the course is designed to use the films of Hitchcock as a way into those broader areas of study. The films have much to teach about the norms of culture, about the way an artist structures audience response, about the interplay of identity and desire in discourse. At the same time, his films and their critical reception may be seen, for the purposes of the seminar, as a series of case studies in the rhetoric of visual culture, introducing a much broader field of study that is likely to be of interest to students of rhetoric, of film, and of communication and culture generally. Students will receive advanced training in the tactics of close reading of complex cultural texts and in theories of cultural rhetoric, with a view to gaining skills and perspectives that may be useful for their own specialized studies.

Among the films to be screened:

Psycho	The Man Who Knew Too Much	Shadow of a Doubt
Vertigo	Murder	The Lady Vanishes
Strangers on a Train	The Birds	The 39 Steps
The Wrong Man	Notorious	Blackmail
Rope	North by Northwest	Rear Window

The class will meet for screenings Tuesdays, 2:30 – 5:30 pm. in room 209 South Henderson Building.

A small discussion section will meet Thursday afternoons, 4:15-5:30 for 75-minute sessions, in room 309 Sparks Building.

A draft of the course syllabus is available at

For more information on the course, contact Professor Thomas W. Benson , whose web site is at