Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Study of the relation of literature and media (manuscript, print, visual, aural, digital, and/or oral) within their cultural and/or performative contexts. May be further organized by methodology (e.g. book history, textual scholarship, media studies, adaptation studies, digital humanities), historical period, or genre. This course may be repeated for credit if a different topic is taught.

COURSE DETAILS:

Ekphrastic and Ecstatic: Painting via Poetry

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what happens when the words are about the picture? Or what happens when the words are the picture, as with John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”? This is a class about the correspondence between visual art and language, or, more specifically, between painting and poetry—in a word, ekphrasis, a slightly stuffy Greek word meaning the poetic representation of a visual image. W. J. T. Mitchell characterizes ekphrasis as “an affair between a speaking/seeing subject and a seen object” in which the speaker “translates” the image for an audience. Why are poets especially fond of such mimetic affairs, and what do they tell us about art, representation, reality, and imagination?

Together, we’ll explore and scrutinize the relationship between poetry and painting, though we’ll also look at other forms of what media theorists dub “intermediation”: poetry and video, poetry and film (see Danez Smith’s “Dinosaurs in the Hood”), perhaps even poetry and music. Ekphrasis goes back thousands of years—Homer is maybe its most famous practitioner—but we’re going to focus on modern instances, including the recent interest in the concept among Black poets. Our (extremely) tentative reading list includes work by W. H. Auden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Browning, Anne Carson, Victoria Chang, Anne Cimon, Rita Dove, Ursula Askham Fanthorpe, Robert Hayden, Terence Hayes, June Jordan, John Keats, Yusef Komunyakaa, Rickey Laurentiis, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Danez Smith, Wislawa Szymborska, and William Carlos Williams.

It’ll help if you’ve taken English 234, “Metrics and Prosody,” but it's defintely not necessary.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

The goals of this course are:

• to refine your understanding of the properties and effects of figurative language;
• to explore the mechanics of linguistic and visual representation and develop strategies for analyzing and explaining those mechanics;
• to theorize, in an informed way, the correspondence between artistic mediums, especially poetry and visual arts, and especially painting;
• to fine-tune your ability to read text and visual art critically, a so-called “soft skill” that can yield big results;
• to polish old strategies and learn new ones for creating and communicating informed claims about art, as well as about its history and contexts; and,
• to use art and its capacities to engage with the ideas of others, including classmates.

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

There are no texts to purchase. All works, including the poems and the visual art, will be available online.

REQUIRED READING NOTES: