Alfred Hitchcock: the name is synonymous not only with cinematic suspense, but also with the appeal of film as both a medium of popular entertainment and the distinctive art form of the twentieth century. Hitchcock's undiminished appeal reflects our continuing fascination with the visual satisfactions classic cinema affords and with the possibilities inherent in the genres (thriller, suspense film, romantic melodrama) in which Hitchcock primarily worked. This course will explore the relation between Hitchcock's achievement of cinematic "mastery" and his constant, even obsessive, attention to questions of gender, sexuality, and socio-cultural authority–questions that underlie his explorations of narrative suspense. We will examine how "seeing" in Hitchcock's films is the join between politics and erotics, inflecting cinematic spectatorship in the direction of such erotic (and political) "perversions" as voyeurism, fetishism, sadism, and masochism—"perversions" that find expression in the stylistic falir of Hitchcock's films. With this in mind we will consider the pleasures that Hitchcock's style affords: Whose pleasure is it? To what does it respond? How does its insistent perversity affect our understanding of his work? We will try to answer these questions by reading a number of essays on Hitchcock and cinema, including recent interventions from the perspectives of psychoanalysis, feminism, and queer theory. In that sense, this course will introduce students to theories of cinematic interpretation. But our engagement with ways of reading film (in an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural framework) will be filtered through the close and careful study of some of the most complex, compelling, and influential texts in cinematic history. These will include The 39 Steps, Rebecca, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, Rope, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds. Students will be encouraged to attend showings of the films on the library's large screen in Tisch 304, but they will be permitted to watch the movies on their own (before the day of class discussion, of course) if they cannot attend the weekly screenings. This course fulfills the post-1860 requirement for English majors.