2007 Senior Seminar Series: A Brief Introduction

Below we present four selections from the work of members of the first graduating class (2007) of Stanford University's new Film and Media Studies department. These papers were chosen from those written in the Film and Media Studies Senior Seminar, held for the first time this winter, led by Professor Scott Bukatman, and titled "Dialectics of Digital Enlightenment." The seminar focused on exploring media theory and criticism old and new - from Horkheimer and Adorno to Marshall McLuhan to Henry Jenkins - and its relations to new and digital media.

One recurring question dealt with throughout the seminar was the position of cinema and the study of film within this broader new-media context. All four of the selections presented here address this issue by establishing some kind of relationship between certain new media phenomena and film theory. This relationship is sometimes positive, sometimes negative, and sometimes tenuous, but by attempting to trace some of its contours, these four papers offer an understanding of how cinema fits into today's ever-expanding media landscape, as well as how one might get a theoretical handle on some newer forms of the moving image.