ENGL 6992 - Art Writing: Tracing the Visible

(crosslisted)
(also ARTH 6992, VISST 6992)

Spring. 4 credits.

M. Jacobus.

“Painting is, first, an affirmation of the visible which surrounds us and which continually appears and disappears” (John Berger). This course will take a literary, psychoanalytic, phenomenological, and philosophic approach to writing about visual art. The founding myths of Freudian psychoanalysis have been concerned with the dynamics of sight and unseeing, looking and blindness, and the appearance and disappearance of the object. Lacan theorizes the Gaze; Merleau-Ponty explores the phenomenology of perception; Derrida posits the blindness that inhabits self-portraiture; Barthes and Benjamin reflect on photography as forms of seeing—subjective, technological, and historical—as well as the mark, the aura, and the trace. Underlying each of these topoi are assumptions about the importance of both perception and affect, and the means by which it is mobilized, interpreted, and historically located.