Authors and Artists

Catalog description

This course explores the many links between modern art and literature, including fiction about artists, illustrations of fiction and poetry, efforts to write in the styles associated with modern art, and practices of ekphrasis (the evocation of visual art in language). These links between authors and artists have exerted a formative influence on the development of modern fiction and poetry as authors and artists in various avant-garde groupings collaborated and competed to generate modes of artistic expression appropriate to modernity. This course examines those interactions. Course objectives are to bring together for comparative examination: * Formal or generic relationships between texts and images at particular historical moments; under this rubric we will consider issues such as ekphrasis. * Creative collaboration and cross-pollination between writers and artists, which have been crucially important in the history of literature and poetry; examples include Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting, Virginia Woolf and Post-Impressionism, Gertrude Stein and Cubism * Conceptions of creativity as these have been expressed by writers using the figure of the artist; texts in this category range from Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece, through Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, to Paul Auster's appropriation from the performance artist Sophie Calle This course explores the ways knowledge of literature and skills in critical reading can be rewardingly brought to bear on the visual arts, and considers how visual art can illuminate the workings of literature both for individual readers and in the classroom.