ARTH 1162 - FWS: Constellations: Relating Image and Text

Spring. 3 credits. Letter grades only.

First-Year Writing Seminar.

L. Fresko.

This seminar considers art and visual culture as sites through which we engage history, philosophy, and the world around us. From art objects to movies, book covers to social media we encounter images constantly and in all arenas of our lives. Given the pervasiveness of visual stimuli, this seminar will use the idea of constellations to rearrange and interpret images. Most of us know Picasso’s Guernica. But can we make sense of it beyond our memorized knowledge if we placed it within the context of excerpts from a story by the Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez and an aerial video of Aleppo that was shot in 2016? Writing will be our tool to construct meaningful constellations from images and texts and critically engage our visual worlds anew.