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2001-2002: EARLY MODERN VISUAL
CULTURE
Explored this year are such issues as the way the visual contests
the printed word, or the way it figures class and gender issues,
or occupies the spaces of theatricality, fashion, or landscape,
or the marketplace and the production of texts. Also considered
is the way early modern visual culture anticipates modern visual
media of TV and the web.
Links to sites integrating
visual culture and the early modern.
Visual Culture Courses
Fall 2001
Patricia Fumerton, English 197: "Early
Modern Visual Culture"
Patricia Fumerton, English 231: "Early
Modern Visual Culture"
Alan Liu, English 233: "Romantic Landscape"
Michael O'Connell, English 197: "Drama as
a Visual Art"
Winter 2002
Lee Bliss, English 197: "Visualizing Shakespeare's Plays"
Spring 2002
Patricia Fumerton, English 165: "Early Modern
Ballad Art"
Mark Rose, English 231: "Visualizing Shakespeare
on Stage and Film"
Elisa Tamarkin, English 235: "Scenes of American Enlightenment"
Course Descriptions
Fall 2001
Patricia Fumerton, English 197: "Early
Modern Visual Culture"
"Early Modern Visual Culture" This course contributes to the EMC's
year-long theme of Visual Culture. It involves the study of the
relation between the verbal and the visual through a survey of changing
modes of self-representation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
literature and art. Visual representations include: formal portraits,
emblems, ballad images, miniatures, architecture, perspective painting,
and family portraits. Literary representations include: Shakespeare's
Richard II, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, ballads,
Jonson's masques, sonnets, and Webster's The Duchess of Malfi.
Patricia Fumerton, English 231: "Early
Modern Visual Culture"
"Early Modern Visual Culture" This is a graduate version of the
undergraduate course that requires more substantive reading of primary
and critical texts.
Michael O'Connell, English 197: "Drama
as a Visual Art"
The course, part of the year-long Visual Culture theme of the
Early Modern Center, considers drama as a visual art. The sixteenth-century
saw a crisis in the status of the image unprecedented in Western
Europe. The religious culture of Europe in the fifteenth and early
decades of the sixteenth century was intensely visual, expressing
itself in the visual art we associate with the Renaissance. But
the Protestant Reformation attacked this art as idolatrous and unleashed
a wave of iconoclasm across Northern Europe, including England.
What were the consequences of this crisis for the drama of Elizabethan
England? As a visual art, theater was also subject to attack. Acknowledging
that theater is indeed a visual as well as a verbal art, we'll study
the ways in which the visual and theater were assailed, then read
plays by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and others that respond to this
crisis in the status of the visual.
Spring 2002
Patricia Fumerton, English 165:"Ballad
Art, 1500-1800"
This course will study the evolution of the broadside ballad during
a crucial phase of its history, when it was disseminated for the
first time in massive numbers, due to the rise of cheap print, and
became an especially occasional form. The course will emphasize
the particular formal features of the ballad, which, for the lower
orders, was quite literally "art," pasted on the walls of their
homes and alehouses. The course will culminate with each student
converting an EEBO ballad into modern type, editing that ballad,
and having it mounted on the EMC's site.
Mark Rose, English 231: Visualizing Shakespeare
on Stage and Film
The goal of the course is to examine Shakespeare's plays in relation
both to early modern visual culture and to modern film versions.
A usual week's assignment will consist of one Shakespeare play,
one film version, and one important theoretical essay. Theoretical
pieces will for the most part be "classics" such as Benjamin's "Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" or Mulvey's "Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Plays will probably include Richard
III, Titus Andronicus, Love's Labors Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream,
Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, and The Tempest. There will be three
options for taking the seminar: 1) research course, 2) reading course,
3) audit. Those taking the seminar as a research course will write
a 15-20 page research paper on a topic related to the course material.
Those taking the seminar as a reading course will write a term paper
(8-10 pp.) and will also write a take-home final exam. All members
of the seminar will present several brief reports during the term.
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