ENGL 459: Topics in Transatlantic and/or World Literature
Text-Image Interaction in 20th Century Literature ~ Dr. Kauffmann
Some cultural theorists have posited that a “visual turn” has taken place in recent decades—meaning that our experience of the world has come to be increasingly mediated by visual representations and visual technologies. Photographs, films, advertisements, the visual arts, new digital media, medical imaging technologies, and new technologies of war have all altered the way we perceive and interact with our world. Other theorists have pointed out a profound and longstanding intertwining of vision and knowledge, particularly in Western thought and tradition. This course will explore the ways in which a number of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary artists from around the world have engaged with the visual and the various questions of knowledge, power, memory, and medium that it raises. We will consider the interaction of image and text in essays, graphic novels, and other texts that incorporate visual material. Questions framing the course will include: What kind of commentary is offered on the visual by these writers? Why are hybrid image-text forms particularly suited to their projects? What effects are created by the interplay between text and image in these books, and how does this interplay comment on issues of knowledge, power, etc.? How do these mixed-media texts influence the way we think about more conventional texts or images? Authors studied may include Virginia Woolf, W.G. Sebald, Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, Claudia Rankine, and Saidiya V. Hartman.