Course Details in 2026/27 Session

Module Title	LH Writing/Painting
School	Eng, Drama, & Creative Studies
Department	English Literature
Module Code	09 37839
Module Lead	John Fagg
Level	Honours Level
Credits	20
Semester	Semester 1
Pre-requisites
Co-requisites
Restrictions	None
Exclusions
Description	This module addresses the corresponding, complementary, and collaborative, but occasionally conflicting, activities of writing and painting. We will look at paintings inspired by writing and writing that responds to painting; art and literary theories that argue for medium specificity or explore interconnection and entanglement between mediums; and recent artworks that make writing an element of painterly practice. Examples of dialogue between writing and painting may include historical novels that imagine and narrate the creative lives of artists; poetry and prose that respond -- with ekphrasis, critical re-description, or appreciation -- to artworks; and poems and paintings that emerge from collaborations between poets and painters, in contexts such as the mid-twentieth-century New York School. We will trace theoretical ideas such as the modernist assertion of medium specificity or the separation of the arts or the question arising from visual culture studies, “What Do Pictures Want?” What might seem a formalist topic takes on political urgency in, for example, textual responses to J. M. W. Turner’s The Slave Ship (1840) or Glenn Ligon’s recent work in “painted language” such as Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am thrown Against a Sharp White Background) (1990). The module is grounded in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American contexts but engages objects and ideas beyond those parameters.
Learning Outcomes	By the end of the module students should be able to: Discuss writing and painting in appropriate and accurate critical vocabularies Locate texts and ideas within a long history of debate about the relationship between the arts Present informed critical arguments about examples of dialogue between writing and painting Ground critical and theoretical ideas in detailed discussion of specific texts and paintings
Assessment	37839-01 : 1,000 Word Assigment : Coursework (30%) 37839-02 : 2,500 Word Essay : Coursework (70%)
Assessment Methods & Exceptions	70% 2500-word essay 30% 1000-word assignment Reassessment: Resubmission of failed component(s)
Other
Reading List