ENG 102: College Writing II

All the videos on this page are from one of our film databases. To view them from off-campus, you will need to login as you would to any other database.

Touted as one of the first major feminist writers, Charlotte Perkins Gilman spent her life fighting to liberate women from the yoke of domesticity. This is a stunning BBC dramatization of Gilman’s autobiographical account of a woman driven to madness by the repressive mores of Victorian culture. Stephen Dillon as the husband, John, and Julia Watson as the despondent heroine give stellar performances in this production directed by the BBC’s John Clive. (76 minutes)

This confessional monologue depicts the decay of one man as a result of his addiction to alcohol. Pomerleau’s portrayal brings to vivid life that character as he evolves from a lover of animals and a caring husband to a demon facing the ultimate horror. (35 minutes)

Despite its Pulitzer Prize status, Tennessee Williams' "Streetcar Named Desire" was considered "too hot" for Hollywood. Movie censors object to the script's underlying sexual repression, homosexuality, nymphomania, and rape

When Queenie and her friends, dressed only in bathing suits, enter Lengel’s A&P to buy kipper snacks, the life of Sammy the cashier is changed forever. This program presents a dramatization of John Updike’s frequently anthologized story of irony and innocence. Updike himself comments on the story in an interview with Donald M. Murray, columnist for The Boston Globe and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer. (31 minutes)

This program consists of five versions of the same short story, “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin, who scandalized American readers in the late 19th century by questioning the social and marital mores of her time. The story examines the behavior and feelings of a woman on the day she is informed of her husband’s death. The program includes a reading of the story by Zoë Wanamaker, plus dramatizations by playwrights Kathleen Potter, David Stafford, and Michelene Wandor. (26 minutes)

In this program, Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker and renowned Langston Hughes biographer Arnold Rampersad talk about the “poet laureate of Harlem” with award-winning filmmaker Bruce Schwartz. Together they discuss experiences that shaped young Langston, how he came to be a writer, the beauty of his writing style, his practice of reaching out to aspiring writers, and the Harlem Renaissance as a literary and cultural watershed. They also discuss the force of religion in Southern Christian African-American communities, and “Salvation,” Hughes’s coming-of-age story, deftly brought to the screen by Schwartz. (26 minutes)

Her father was philosopher William Godwin. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was feminism’s founder. By pedigree and experience, Mary Shelley was uncannily equipped to write the gothic masterpiece Frankenstein. This program offers a fresh exploration of her novel, focusing on how Shelley’s personal life influenced the book and mirrored it afterwards. Along with reenactments of scenes from her classic and dramatizations of her life, the program draws from a wealth of primary sources, including readings from her mother’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Mary Shelley’s personal letters, as well as those of her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and of Lord Byron. A BBCW Production. (60 minutes)

Robert, a blind man and now a widower, has come to visit his friend and her husband. Prompted by a television show, the apprehensive husband asks Robert if he really knows what a cathedral is: his answer is a lesson in how to truly see. This dramatization of Raymond Carver’s classic short story “Cathedral” presents a minimalist exploration of loneliness, vision, and personal spirituality. An interview follows with Carver’s widow, Tess Gallagher, whose poem “The Hands of the Blindman” is excerpted in the production. (56 minutes)

The PDF of an article by Charlotte Perkins Gilman which was published in The Forerunner in 1913.