VISST-300-level seminars continue the development and expansion of students' research, writing, and visual analytic skills, while also providing the opportunity for close, critical, study of visual artifacts associated with a specific and significant topic. Students in the Mad Max Seminar will engage with the relevant primary and secondary sources for this sardonic apocalyptic narrative, as well as investigate the three main themes of the films and the graphic novels that compose the franchise: New Rules of War/Rules of Law, Changing Stereotypes/ Status of Women, Images of Environmental Degradation/cultural history of the trope. In addition, we will attend to broad global historical and cultural contexts framing 1975 and 2015, the 4 decades during which the four filmic artifacts were written, storyboarded, shot and edited and when the graphic novel sequels and prequels were published. Students enrolled in the Mad Max Seminar will engage in rigorous, repeat, even slowed-down screenings of all four films of the Tetralogy. The film series and the graphic novels themselves are our primary source materials. The socio-historical contexts in which the works were written, storyboarded and shot and published provide secondary material to be carefully researched, selected and subject to visual analyses. By means of class screenings, individual researches, class presentations, discussions and debates, we will view the works through a triad of analytic lenses: Posthumanist, Vital Materialist, and Eco-critical; three intimately interrelated views through which main themes of this apocalyptic satire can profitably be viewed.

Visit Workday to view this information.