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CS92PROD
Literature and Visual Culture in Shakespeare's England
ENGL 372
Fall 2013 not offered
Crosslisting: CHUM 372

This interdisciplinary course explores the relationship between literature and visual culture as conceived and developed by poets, playwrights, and painters of the English Renaissance. We will examine the relationship between the word and the image in a broad range of texts including aesthetic treatises, poems, plays, and court masques and consider how they influenced and were influenced by contemporary visual culture. Equal attention will be paid to the production and reception of the verbal and visual field: How did poets, playwrights, and painters conceive and materially produce the relation of the verbal to the visual in their respective media? And how was this relation in turn received by readers, audiences, and spectators? Several trips to Olin Library's Special Collections will allow us to see firsthand how early printed books materially shaped their meanings, both verbally and visually. Topics covered will include iconoclasm and iconophobia, the tradition of "ut pictura poesis" (as is painting, so is poetry), the paragone (competition or comparison) between the verbal and visual arts, visual poetics and rhetorical tropes (e.g., ekphrasis, enargia, hypotyposis), the gendered discourse of "face-painting" (portraiture, cosmetics), the influence of visual culture on dramatic literature and stagecraft.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA ENGL
Course Format: SeminarGrading Mode: Graded
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Major Requirement for: None

Last Updated on MAR-28-2024
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