The emphasis is on a critical discussion of the artistic and literary concepts concerning the transformations of a visual mode of expression into a literary one, based on the analysis of narrative and poetic texts. Literary examples include Homer, Lessing, Goethe, James, Woolf, Proust, DosPassos, Breton, Cortazar, Barnes, Burroughs, Ashberry, Hofmann. This course will introduce students to an examination of the relation of literature to media such as painting, photography, and film. The emphasis is on a critical discussion of the artistic and literary concepts concerning the visual dimension of narrative and poetic texts and the narrativity of pictorial and cinematic modes of expression. Literary examples include Homer, Lessing, Goethe, James, Woolf, Proust, DosPassos, Breton, Cortazar, Barnes, Burroughs, Ashberry, and Hofmann.
Readings focus on relevant passages of major novels in the American and European tradition.
This course will examine the interrelation of literature and the visual arts with an emphasis on the development from realism via modernism to contemporary literature. Major texts of the last two centuries provide examples of how painting, photography, and film interact with literary texts. The narratives, poems, and selected passages of novels offer a wide variety of aesthetic phenomena ensuing from the technical development of visual media. To retain a sense of historical emergence of these phenomena, the course keeps a loose chronological order but puts the emphasis on thematic units to allow comparisons and critical judgement. Thus the rivalry of and mutual exchange between the visual and the verbal arts is made transparent.