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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%)