What could be better than sitting on your couch and watching movies during the summer?
Getting three credit hours for doing it, that’s what. And ETSU is doing just that with an online English class called “Hollywood Watches Television.”
“It’s entirely online,” said Dr. Thomas Holmes, the English professor who will teach the class. “It’s a dual session class. My concern was in teaching a film class during the summer. I wanted to make certain that people had the opportunity to assimilate the information. Students will be able to watch the movies at pretty much their own pace.”
The class will study television’s influence on American culture. Over the last few decades, movies have suggested that television has had a negative influence on culture. The movies do acknowledge that movies shape the way that humans think about each other, Holmes said.
The films are divided into three categories: TV News Is Not News, TV and the Lowest Common Denominator and TV and Social Definition.
The movies include popular titles such as Natural Born Killers, Wag the Dog, Requiem for a Dream, The Truman Show and The Brady Bunch Movie.
“For one section there will be seven movies and [the students] need to watch five of them,” Holmes said. “There will be a specific deadline when an essay will be due about two of those five movies.
“There will also be online objective assessments about every movie. If people choose to, they can watch more than the required number and earn extra credit by taking the assessments for the extra ones.”
There will not be a screening of the movies for the students to watch. The Sherrod Library will have all of the movies on reserve to be viewed in the library, or the student can rent or buy the movies.
“The majority of these movies are fairly recent films,” Holmes said. “They’re readily available. The majority of them you could find at a movie rental store. Or, some of them are so inexpensive that [students] may want to purchase them.”
The class fulfills English major or film studies minor requirements. For more information on the class or for a syllabus, e-mail Holmes at holmest@mail.etsu.edu.

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