On the issue of how to go about introducing difficult theory to students, I think Amy Holberg's response to Mike's points is a valuable one. There is only so much any one course can do effectively. I teach an intro course here, and in it I teach film style, narrative and other formal structures/principles, authorship and genre. And that's it. I can't imagine how I would fit history or theory into it. My students just about get how to describe and analyse editing patterns after one full week only on that (each stylistic system- editing, mise-en-scene, cinematography, sound- gets one week). But then, I need not try to imagine how to do this: I know that by graduation, they'll have had plenty of history and theory. I do think there's a danger with an intro course that gets too ambitious, rather than one that does a specific thing (though this may include gestures toward other concerns, whatever they may be, that get explored with detail and rigor later on) within the larger context of a program's required courses. But then, Mike, I have no idea what your institutional context is, and what's expected of you, so my point could be moot. I do think, though, that an intro course can only ever be an intro (with or without what we are calling theory in this particular discussion), and that may mean it has to be enough to say, there is a feminist critique of media, and Haskell and Douglas, for instance, represent in themselves a couple of fairly distinct ways to talk about this (simple readings demonstrating markedly different approaches or assumptions could be helpful in indicating there's a whole other terrain out there for the more committed or the ongoing student). But of course there's another issue here, and one that has to do with jargon. The use of jargon in academic work is one debate in itself, but maybe another is: where are the public intellectuals in film or media studies, who can translate these ideas in some way for a general audience without abusing them? Susan Douglas is one of them, I suppose, at least in some of her work, but after her I am hard pressed... pbr ---- For past messages, visit the Screen-L Archives: http://bama.ua.edu/archives/screen-l.html