Spring 2027 First Year Seminar

FSEM 100-1 (CRN 4700)

How influential is Hollywood? Who decides what appears on our screens? Hollywood has a long history of avoiding official censorship by organizing its own office to control and edit out provocative content before controversy could attract official attention. While we often talk of repressive regimes elsewhere, during WWII Hollywood created its own propaganda films and the government did, in fact, make many decisions about what should or should not be screened to benefit the nation. This course explores the history and morality of movies, the Motion Picture Production Code, the politics of WWII, the Blacklist, the code’s breakdown, and the rise of the rating system. How DID films express ideas in the face of these codes? Last, we will discuss current issues in censorship including marketplace demands and cancel culture.

Your Professor

Nicole Denner, PhD, attended Indiana University for her undergraduate and master's degrees and received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Northwestern University. She studied horror films at IU and eighteenth-century Enlightenment literature for her doctorate (they aren't so different after all). She has taught at Stetson since 2001 in both the French and English departments. She is most interested in how and why texts so frequently turn inward and comment upon themselves.