GERST 6910 - [Vision in Theory]

(crosslisted) ARTH 6910, COML 6142

Fall or Spring. Not offered: 2021-2022. Next offered: 2022-2023. 4 credits. Student option grading.

P. McBride.

This course takes as its point of departure the foundational questions that have informed interdisciplinary inquiry into vision and visuality in recent decades: What is an image? How do images produce meaning? How has vision been defined historically and methodologically? How has visual culture been construed theoretically? Our goal will be to sketch the genealogical trajectories that comprise visual studies as a field of investigation by focusing on concerns that have shaped larger theoretical debates on the politics and ethics of representation, including mimesis, realism, perspective, the interplay of word and image, attention, spectacle, and surveillance. Readings will be drawn from influential works in visual theory, cultural semiotics and anthropology, media studies, and the science of vision. They may include texts by Alpers, Bal, Barthes, Crary, Elkins, Foucault, Haraway, Jay, Livingstone, Merleau-Ponty, Mitchell, Stafford, Panofski, Ranciere, and Virilio, among others.