Seminar: Eraserhead

How did “Lynchian” become an adjective and what has it come to mean?

Dive into this Big Screen Debut with BU professor Jonathan Foltz and discover how this gamechanging first feature established a signature style that launched David Lynch into cult auteur status.  

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

Jonathan Foltz is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Cinema & Media Studies Program at Boston University.  He is the author of The Novel After Film (Oxford University Press, 2018), and studies the intertwined histories of film and literary modernism, as well as the poetics of contemporary cinema.  He has published work on the experimental novels of Virginia Woolf; the “mistakist” cinema of Harmony Korine; the rise of film novelizations in the silent period; W. H. Auden’s lyrical documentary work; and the films of Carlos Reygadas, among other topics.  At BU, he offers courses on a range of topics, including digital cinema, film noir, avant-garde literature and film, the films of Terrence Malick, modernist literature, and film and media theory.  He is also a not-so-secret Lynch fanatic, who teaches a bizarro seminar on Twin Peaks once in a blue moon. You can read his take on Twin Peaks: The Return here.