| Unit name | Writing for Art |
|---|---|
| Unit code | ENGL39019 |
| Credit points | 20 |
| Level of study | H/6 |
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24) |
| Unit director | Dr. Cheeke |
| Open unit status | Not open |
| Pre-requisites |
None |
| Co-requisites |
None |
| School/department | Department of English |
| Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
This unit will explore the relationship between writing and visual art, from 1800 to the present. Topics will include the relation between text and image, the notion of reading a painting, the rivalry that exists between the ‘sister arts’, notions of temporality, questions of aesthetics (beauty and truth), writing that has inspired paintings, the figure of the artist, notions of ‘realism’ and representation, Greek sculpture and Romantic writing, Pre-Raphaelitism, the Victorians and the Renaissance, Aestheticism, photography and literature. Authors to be studied may include: Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, William Hazlitt, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, W.H.Auden, Randall Jarrell, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Don DeLillo, Bernard Malamud, and many contemporary examples.
Aims:
To introduce students to the multiform relations between literature and the plastic arts; to encourage students to explore the theory of such relations; and to focus upon specific author and subject-based examples.
Students will have become familiar with a wide-range of examples of the relations between literature and the plastic arts, and with the body of theory written in response to such work. They will be able to offer critical analysis of such work within an interdisciplinary framework of literature and art.
1 x 2 hour seminar per week, plus 1-to-1 discussion in consultation hours where desired.
James Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetry of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993).
John Hollander, The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art (Chicago: Chicago University press, 1995);
Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press, 1992);
W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986);
Stephen Cheeke, Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008).
Fuller reading lists will be provided week by week
