CTCS 499 Media and the Mind syllabus
CTCS 499 Special Topics: Media and the Mind
Units: 4.0
Time: Wednesdays—14:00 – 17.50
Spring 2018
Instructor: Kiki Benzon
Office: SCI 101c
Office Hours: by appointment
Contact: kbenzon@cinema.usc.edu
Course Description
This course explores the representation of the human mind in a range of media practices—cinema, television, literature, and games. We will consider how our conceptions of the mind and its many facets are reflected through our media artifacts, and how these artifacts in turn inform cultural understandings of psychological, ontological, and neurological systems. Literature has long engaged with the puzzles of the mind: from mental atrophy in William Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606), to PTSD in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), to artificial intelligence in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). Film and television have brought narratives of the mind to the screen, where addiction, insomnia, depression, dementia, autism, and other disorders of the brain are dramatized. The fragility of memory is performed in Memento (2000) and Still Alice (2014), while the protocols of psychiatric treatment are chronicled in The Sopranos (1997) and Homeland (2011). Digital technology has afforded us new ways to represent, explore, and experience the mind through immersion and interactivity in online environments, virtual reality, and video games. Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest (2013) conveys the experience of depression by situating the player in a space as it would appear to a sufferer of that illness; in MIT’s EyeWire (2012), a research venture that fuses gameplay and neuroscience, online players work collaboratively to map 3D neurons in a retina. Through analysis of the expressive and transformative capacities of media, we will confront and critique cultural, psychological, and neurological understandings of the human mind and its possible futures.
Learning Objectives
Students will emerge from this course with
– insight into the particular affordances of various media types—film, television, games, etc.—as they function to express and influence mental states
– familiarity with a range of psychological, psychiatric, and neurological disorders as they are, and have been, conceived in scientific and cultural spheres
– understanding of the critical discourse surrounding media representations of mental illness and its treatment
– specific knowledge of important narrative and interactive works that foreground psychological processes and psychiatric disability
Required Readings and Supplementary Materials
Critical readings and short literary texts will be provided as PDFs, which can be accessed on the course website. Students are expected to acquire any editions of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Don DeLillo’s The Day Room (1986), and Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis (2002).
Description and Assessment of Assignments
Over the course of the term, students will submit five critical comments (15%) to the course website, ctcs499.com; comments (200-300 words) should be posted by 17:00 on the day before class. Three critical comments must be submitted before mid-term. The comments should present an analysis of arguments/ideas communicated in the week’s reading assignments. Worth 3% each, comments will be evaluated in terms of their clarity and intellectual content. Students must also come to class with two critical questions (10%) stemming from the week’s readings; these should be emailed to the T.A. before class.
At the start of the term, students will schedule a date for their presentation (30%) by choosing a week/topic on a Google Docs sheet. The presentation (45-60 minutes) should build upon (but not summarize) the week’s critical readings and introduce/analyze a set of cultural products—films, games, literature, installations, etc.—that relate to ideas communicated in the readings.
Student will produce a final essay (25%) (1500-2000 words) that offers a critical argument and analysis on a subject related to the course theme. Essays will be presented (in a skeletal/condensed form) as Pecha Kucha talks (10%) on the last day of class.
Participation (10%) will be based on the student’s level of engagement with ideas and themes in the course, as demonstrated by thoughtful and constructive contributions to class discussion and questions posed to presenters and guest speakers. Students can also participate by responding to peer entries on the course website, bringing to our attention course-related events or resources, or anything else that will extend our understanding of course content.
Grading Breakdown
| Assignment | % of Grade |
| Critical Comments (5) | 15% |
| Critical Questions (10) | 10% |
| Presentation | 30% |
| Final Essay | 25% |
| Petcha Kucha Talk | 10% |
| Participation | 10% |
| TOTAL | 100% |
Grading Scale
Course final grades will be determined using the following scale:
A 95-100
A- 90-94
B+ 87-89
B 83-86
B- 80-82
C+77-79
C 73-76
C- 70-72
D+67-69
D 63-66
D- 60-62
F 59 and below
Assignment Submission Policy
Written assignments should be submitted on time and in electronic form (PDF). Contributions to the course forum should be submitted to the course website by 17:00 on the day before class.
Additional Policies
Essays submitted after the due date will be penalized half a letter grade per day late to a maximum of four days, at which point the essay will receive a zero. Attendance is mandatory; if you need to miss class for medical reasons, please provide the instructor or teaching assistant with a doctor’s note. Classes missed without documentation will result in a 2% deduction from your participation mark. Arriving late to and departing early from class is considered an absence. On screening days, you are encouraged to remain and view the film, but you may be excused on the condition that you will watch the assigned film before the following class. If we have a guest speaker scheduled, you must remain in class for their presentation and Q&A.
Laptops and tablets (but not phones) may be used during class, but only for note-taking or course- related activities. Every now and then, you may be asked to put all electronic devices away, so be sure to have paper and pens with you, in case you need to take notes.
Course Schedule: A Weekly Breakdown
WEEK 1: January 10
scientific and cultural approaches to the mind
| screening | Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997) |
WEEK 2: January 17
mind-body and consciousness
| readings | Dennett, Daniel. “The Architecture of the Human Mind.” Consciousness Explained. Back Bay Books, 1995. |
| activities | Student Presentation TBA (30%) |
| screening | TBA |
historicizing mental orders and disorders
| prepare | Erb, Cynthia. “‘Have You Ever Seen the inside of One of Those Places?’: Psycho, Foucault, and the Postwar Context of Madness.” Cinema Journal. 45.4. (2006): 45-63.
Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock) |
| screening | Titicut Follies (Fredrick Wiseman, 1967) 84 mins. |
WEEK 3: January 24
the unconscious
| prepare | Metz, Christian. “Part III The Fiction Film and its Spectator: A Metapsychological Study.” The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Britton et al. trans. London: Macmillan, 1982.
Berlin, Heather. “The Neural Basis of the Dynamic Unconscious.” Neuropsychoanalysis. 13.1. (2011). Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” (1839) |
| activities | Student Presentation TBA (30%) |
| screening | Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972) |
WEEK 4: January 31
media, cognition, ontology
| prepare | Grodal, Torben. “Visual Fiction as Embodied Mental Flow.” Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition. Clarendon, 1999. |
| activities | Student Presentation TBA (30%) |
| screening | Being John Malkovich (Charlie Kaufman |
WEEK 5: February 7
Upstream Color (Shane Carruth, 2013)
WEEK 6: February 14
memory and identity
| readings
|
Matthews, Paul. “The Mnemonic Brain: Neuroimaging, Neuropharmacology, and Disorders of Memory.” The Memory Process: Neuroscientific and Humanistic Perspectives. Nalbantian, Suzanne et al. eds. MIT, 2010.
Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Paul and Palmer, trans. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1911. |
| activities | Student Presentation TBA (30%) |
| screening | Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000) |
WEEK 7: February 21
the psychiatric gaze
| readings | DeLillo, Don. The Day Room (1986)
Kane, Sarah. 4.48 Psychosis (2002) |
| activities | Student Presentation TBA (30%) |
| screening | In Treatment (excerpts) (HBO 2008-2010) |
WEEK 8: February 28
clinic, treatment, stigma
| readings | Conrad, Peter and Joseph Schneider. “Medical Model of Madness: Emergence of Mental Illness.” Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness. Temple UP, 1980.
Goodwin, John. “The Horror of Stigma: Psychosis and Mental Health Care Environments in Twenty-First-Century Horror Film.” Perspectives in Psychiatric Care. 4 (2014) |
| activities | Student Presentation TBA (30%) |
| screening | Mental (Seishin) (Kazuhiro Sûdo, 2008) |
WEEK 9: February 28
hysteria and the body
| readings | Quintero, Jessie. ‘When Women “Snap”: The Use of Mental Illness to Contextualize Women’s Acts of Violence in Contemporary Popular Media.’ Women’s Studies in Communication. 39.2 (2016): 211-227.
Rimke, Heidi. “Constituting Transgressive Interiorities.” Violence and the Body: Race, Gender and the State. Aldama, ed. Indiana UP, 2003. |
| activities | Student Presentation TBA (30%) |
| screening | Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965) / |
WEEK 10: March 7
the brain on cinema, videogames, virtual reality
| readings | Hasson, Uri, et al. “Neurocinematics: The Neuroscience of Film.” Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind. 2.1 (2008): 1-23.
Mehta, Mayank et al. “Impaired spatial selectivity and intact phase precession in two-dimensional virtual reality.” Nature Neuroscience. 18.1 (January 2015):121-128 Palaus, Marc et al. “Neural Basis of Video Gaming: A Systematic Review.” Frontiers of Human Neuroscience. 22. (2017) Clemenson, Gregory and Craig Stark. “Behavioral/Cognitive Virtual Environmental Enrichment through Video Games Improves Hippocampal-Associated Memory.” The Journal of Neuroscience. 35.49 (2015): 16116 –16125. |
| activities | Student Presentation TBA (30%) / Nevermind (Flying Mollusk, 2015) |
WEEK 11: March 14
spring break
WEEK 12: March 21
obsessive compulsion and addiction
| readings | Andreassen, Cecilie et al. “The relationship between addictive use of social media and video games and symptoms of psychiatric disorders: A large-scale cross- sectional study.” Psychology of Addictive Behaviors. 30.2. (2016): 252-262.
Weinstein, Amy. “New developments on the neurobiological and pharmaco-genetic mechanisms underlying internet and videogame addiction.” The American Journal on Addictions. 24.2 (2015). |
| activities | Student Presentation TBA (30%) |
| screenings | Hoarders (excerpts) (A&E, 2009-2013) |
WEEK 13: March 28
artificial minds and posthumanism
| readings | Hayles, Katherine. “The Second Wave of Cybernetics: From Reflexivity to Self- Organization.” How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature & Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Stuart, Susan. “Extended Body, Extended Mind: The Self as Prosthesis. Screen Consciousness: Cinema, Mind and World. Pepperell and Punt, eds. Rodolpi, 2006. |
| activities | Student Presentation TBA (30%) |
| screenings | Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2014) / Westworld (excerpts) (HBO, 2016) |
WEEK 14: April 4
virtual reality and disembodiment
| readings | Reiner, Miriam. “Presence: Brain, virtual reality and robots.” Brain Research Bulletin. 85.5. (2011).
Gibson, William. Neuromancer. (1984) |
| activities | Student Presentation TBA (30%) |
| screening | Fragments (Microsoft, 2016) / The Rose & I (Penrose, 2016) / Mobility in Zambia (StoryUp, 2016) |
WEEK 15: April 11
class cancelled / substitute
WEEK 16: April 18
WEEK 17: April 25
wrap-up / Pecha Kucha Talks
| activities | Pecha Kucha Talks (10%) |
FINALS WEEK
Final Essay due (25%)
Statement on Academic Conduct and Support Systems
Academic Conduct:
Plagiarism – presenting someone else’s ideas as your own, either verbatim or recast in your own words – is a serious academic offense with serious consequences. Please familiarize yourself with the discussion of plagiarism in SCampus in Part B, Section 11, “Behavior Violating University Standards” https://policy.usc.edu/scampus-part-b/. Other forms of academic dishonesty are equally unacceptable. See additional information in SCampus and university policies on scientific misconduct, http://policy.usc.edu/scientific-misconduct.
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Free and confidential mental health treatment for students, including short-term psychotherapy, group counseling, stress fitness workshops, and crisis intervention. https://engemannshc.usc.edu/counseling/
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline – 1-800-273-8255
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PLEASE NOTE:
FOOD AND DRINKS (OTHER THAN WATER) ARE NOT PERMITTED IN ANY INSTRUCTIONAL SPACES IN THE CINEMATIC ARTS COMPLEX