447 THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT SUMMER AT MTSU

Unusual Classes Tackle Sitcoms, Southern Religion, “The Sopranos,” and Insobriety

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: May 23, 2006
EDITORIAL CONTACT: Gina Logue, 615-898-5081

(MURFREESBORO) - If you have ever stuffed chocolates in your bra at a candy factory, felt like going on a cursing and shooting spree, imbibed too much or proselytized for fun and profit, you can relive all those pleasant memories with maximal educational benefit and minimal damage to your reputation in some of the summer’s most unique classes.
Dr. Tom Berg, associate professor of electronic media communication, returns with his popular class about television situation comedies. This summer, he starts again with “I Love Lucy” and ends with “Friends,” but there will be a lot to think about and talk about between those classics.
“The truly great situation comedies just have fantastic writers who know how to explore the human condition and to help us to see ourselves in that human condition,” Berg says.
Berg says sitcoms that stand the test of time are more likely to be non-topical politically and socially, whether they concentrate on the family or the workplace.
“I would call ‘Frasier’ an evergreen in its own right because it’s looking at human beings, characters, and it doesn’t really talk about who’s in office at that particular time or what the social problems are of that time, the hot button issues,” Berg says.
While the format has evolved over the years, Berg does not welcome all the changes. He says the increase in commercial content gives writers less time to develop fully formed characters. Berg is also tired of seeing the TV screen polluted with what he considers endless promos and crawls that detract from the comedy and offer largely useless information.
Each student will investigate two sitcoms, write a paper, deliver an oral presentation and examine popular literature of each particular sitcom’s era.
In the final season of HBO’s groundbreaking drama “The Sopranos,” Dr. David Lavery, English professor, is initiating an exploration of the series buttressed by an analysis of another HBO effort, “Deadwood.” These unique treatments of the gangster and Western formats, respectively, will prompt students to rethink their views of television as literature.


“The best of television does still require us to engage our intellects in ways that are very much like reading a book,” Lavery says. “We have to do the interpreting. We have to figure out how this character works. We have to figure out how to respond to him.”
Lavery, who has written extensively about another long-running drama, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” says there is a lot to challenge even viewers with good educations in the programs his students will be viewing. To hear Lavery explain the dialogue of “The Sopranos” is to listen to a review of subtle references so varied and deep that the guiding rubric surely was either a T.S. Eliot poem replete with footnotes or at least an old Dennis Miller monologue.
“The language on ‘Deadwood’ is positively Shakespearean, even though it’s profane,” Lavery says.
Students will spend seven weeks on “The Sopranos,” about which Lavery has edited two books, and three weeks on “Deadwood,” the subject of another book edited by Lavery. They will write three critical essays about an individual episode, a theme stretching over multiple episodes and a choice of either a televisual or formal aspect of the series such as directing or writing or an overview of a single “Sopranos” season. Videos and DVDs will be made available.
Just when you thought the short story was something you left behind in high school, another English professor, Dr. Claudia Barnett, revives it with “Hurdles and Hangovers: Stories of Everyday Life.”
“Almost all short stories are about hurdles of some kind because you have something to overcome, which is what makes it into a story to begin with,” Barnett says. “But, strangely, many of these short stories had hangovers in them, too,” especially characters in author Raymond Carver’s writings. Later in the semester, Barnett says, the hangovers become less physical and more metaphorical.
Students will read four books of contemporary short stories and two older longer stories. They will write critical analyses, one for each of the big books.
“I think, in the long run, it’s less reading and more writing than a class would do during a full semester because it seems like you can balance it out more reasonably,” Barnett says.
The two older short stories Barnett has chosen are “The Death of Ivan Ilych” by Leo Tolstoy and Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” which Barnett says is “a great hangover story, if you look at it that way.
“There are all these famous old short stories that everybody knows, like ‘Metamorphosis,’ but this short story class has more to do with today, and I think that makes the hurdles and hangovers more appropriate,” Barnett says.
If students come to class with hangovers, will they earn extra credit?
“No,” Barnett says. “It’s a two-and-a-half-hour class. That’s a bad idea.”


The Southern undergraduate who fails to see the South as a region of religious diversity is in for a shock in “Prophets and Preachers,” which is being taught by Dr. David Rowe, history professor. Rowe uses film clips from “Driving Miss Daisy,” “O Brother, Where Art Thou?,” “Gone With the Wind,” “Beloved,” and other movies to show a wide range of Southern spirituality.
“In a sense, what we might call Southern religion is very much like what Northern religion became before the Civil War,” Rowe says. “It’s very much centered on the capacity of a particular individual to convey a message in a dramatic way. Demagogic politics and fundamental religion and enthusiastic religion are very similar to each other.” Students also will read “A Turn in the South,” the perspective of Trinidad’s V.S. Naipaul, who traveled the South to ask what it is to be Southern. Rowe says he hopes this book will help students view the region and its religions through the eyes of a stranger. He says the South historically has treated non-Protestant Christians and people of other faiths as outsiders unless they assimilate to the overall culture.
“If you want to maintain your religiosity in whatever way you want in private, that’s fine so long as in public you conform, which is how other traditions in the South have learned to survive for the most part,” Rowe says. “Those that have bucked the system can do it successfully only if they are physically isolated from the rest of the South, just so far removed that nobody pays much attention to them.”
Additionally, he will require students to perform a community inventory of religious expressions to “make them more sensitive to their religious environment.” The inventory involves taking stock of highway markers, road signs and other subtle expressions of religion they might not have acknowledged in the past.