Unit information: Writing for Art in 2011/12

Unit name	Writing for Art
Unit code	ENGL39019
Credit points	20
Level of study	H/6
Teaching block(s)	Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24)
Unit director	Dr. Cheeke
Open unit status	Not open
Pre-requisites	None
Co-requisites	None
School/department	Department of English
Faculty	Faculty of Arts

Description including Unit Aims

This unit will explore the relationship between writing and visual art, from 1800-the present. Aspects of ekphrasis (the technical term for poems about paintings) will be examined both in relation to a wide range of authors and topics in different periods, and in relation to the body of theory that has responded to this kind of writing. Topics will include the relation between text and image, the notion of reading a painting, the rivalry that exists between the sister arts, notions of temporality, questions of aesthetics (beauty and truth), writing that has inspired paintings, the figure of the artist, notions of 'realism' and representation, Greek sculpture and Romantic writing, Pre-Raphaelitism, the Victorians and the Renaissance, Aestheticism, photography and literature.

Aims:

To introduce students to the multiform relations between literature and the plastic arts; to encourage students to explore the theory of such relations; and to focus upon specific author and subject-based examples.

Intended Learning Outcomes

Students will have become familiar with a wide-range of examples of the relations between literature and the plastic arts, and with the body of theory written in response to such work. They will be able to offer critical analysis of such work within an interdisciplinary framework of literature and art.

Teaching Information

1 x 2 hour seminar per week, plus 1-to-1 discussion in consultation hours where desired.

Assessment Information

• 1 short essay (2000 words max) one-third of unit mark 33.3%

• 1 long essay (4000 words max) two-thirds of unit mark 66.7%

Reading and References

Authors will include: Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, William Hazlitt, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, W.H.Auden, Randall Jarrell, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and many contemporary examples.

Useful criticism:

• James Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetry of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993)

• Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press, 1992)

• W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986)