Critical Image COLT 487, 22069D, Spring 2011, Mons and Weds, 3:30-4:50 pm, THH 118

This course aims to provide an advanced introduction to the fi eld of verbal-visual studies. How have we told stories about pictures and what do these stories tell us about our pictures and ourselves? This course will explore the ways in which various fi elds—semiotics, literary and cultural criticism, fi lm theory, art history, and philosophy, among others—have tried to think about the image. We’ll look at critical texts as well as the different images which they confi gure and narrate as their objects. In doing so, we’ll examine the ways in which images serve not only as the bases for criticism but can also serve as vehicles of critical thought—and even as sites where conceptualization may be exceeded.

We will begin by establishing some key terms: what is an image? What is the history of thinking about the image? How can we further refi ne our understanding of types of images? We’ll read Michel Foucault’s analysis of Diego Velasquez’s painting, Las meninas (1656), along a fi ction by Oscar Wilde that creates a narrative from elements in Velasquez’s work (2 weeks). We’ll extend our consideration of Foucault’s work on the image into a reading of his This Is Not a Pipe, a discussion of the painting by the Belgian Surrealist, René Magritte. We’ll discuss additional paintings by Magritte, as well as visual works by Marcel Broodthaers, Ed Ruscha, and others. We’ll also read concrete poetry and cal- ligrams (2 weeks). Next, we’ll investigate the links among painting, cinema, narrative and theory by analyzing Peter Greenaway’s two recent fi lms based on Rembrandt’s painting The Night Watch (1642): Night Watching (2007) and Rembrandt’s J’accuse (2008) (2 weeks). We’ll read the essay, “The Rhetoric of the Image” by Roland Barthes and connect and it to a graphic novel commissioned by the Louvre Museum, Glacial Period by Nicolas de Crécy) (1 week).

In the second part of our course, we’ll explore different philosophic and aesthetic approaches to the image. We’ll read Jean-Luc Nancy’s text, The Grounds of the Image, and consider some of the spe- cifi c examples he discusses (landscape paintings, paintings of the death of Cleopatra, for example) (3 weeks) and then we’ll read Jacques Rancière’s meditation on the image in the twenty-fi rst century, The Future of the Image, while examining specifi c visual examples along the way (3 weeks). We’ll examine literary-critical examples of ekphrasis (the verbal rendering of a visual object) in relation to Teesa Bry- ant’s work about the presence/absence of African Americans in fi lms, Unexplained Presence, and Jon Yau’s poetic evocations of race and identity via classic Hollywood fi lms in his poetry (2 weeks).

Requirements: 3 short (5-page) papers: 20% each 1 longer (10-page) paper: 30% In-class exercises: 10% Dante Gabriel Rossetti, How They Met Themselves. Pen, ink, and brush on paper (1860). COLT L/M/CT Track: This is a Critical Thought concentration course.

Professor Michael Du Plessis [email protected], THH 155a