ILVS 70 / FAH 92-03: Introduction to Visual Studies Spring 2015 Jeremy Melius jeremy.melius@tufts.edu Monday 6:00-9:00pm, 11 Talbot Avenue, Seminar Room Office Hours: Monday 4:00-5:30pm, 11 Talbot Ave., third floor, or by appointment Course Description: This course provides a critical introduction to the complexities presented by the ubiquity of images in contemporary cultural life. It does so through an exploration of the various, sometimes competing approaches that thinkers have taken in seeking to conceptualize visual experience. Rather than offering a single, unified method, the course instead poses the question, what is visual studies? by investigating the ways in which disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, art history, and literary studies have sought to interpret a diverse range of historical phenomena. The goal is not only to become familiar with fundamental concepts of this capacious interdisciplinary field, but also to develop a precise and flexible vocabulary of one s own with which to address the visual. Learning Objectives: Become familiar with various scholarly approaches to visual perception, representation, and experience Learn to analyze, interpret, and write effectively about visual artifacts and theories of the visual Develop a critical understanding of visual studies as an emerging field Course Requirements: Attendance and active participation. Brief weekly comments (1-2 pages each) on readings and/or selected visual materials, due in advance. Three longer writing assignments (5-8 pages each). Course meetings will be largely discussion based. All readings should be read in advance of the session to which they correspond. It is imperative that you keep up with the readings and that you read actively, taking notes not only on a given text s arguments but also on your own responses, so that you will be able to participate fully. Grading: Participation and weekly comments 30% Longer writing assignments 70%
Academic Integrity: The strength of the university depends on academic and personal integrity, and Tufts holds its student strictly accountable. In this course, you must be honest and truthful. Ethical violations include cheating on exams, plagiarism, reuse of assignments, improper use of the Internet and electronic devices, unauthorized collaboration, alteration of graded assignments, forgery and falsification, lying, facilitating academic dishonesty, and unfair competition. The consequences for violations can be severe. It is critical that you understand the requirements of ethical behavior and academic work as described in the university s Academic Handbook. If you ever have a question about the expectations concerning a particular assignment in the course, be sure to ask me for clarification. Students suspected of academic integrity violations will be reported to the Dean of Student Affairs Office. Student Accessibility Services: Tufts University is committed to full inclusion of all students. Any student who may need accommodations in this class on account of a documented disability should please speak with me during office hours as soon as possible. For information on the process of requesting accommodations, please contact Student Accessibility Services, Dowling Hall, Suite 720, 617-627-4539, Accessibility@tufts.edu. Electronics Policy: At Tufts, professors set their own policies for the use of electronics in the classroom. In order to foster an atmosphere conducive to discussion, electronic devices may only be used with the instructor s permission. I hope you can share my commitment to making our time together in the classroom free from distractions. Classes may not be recorded without written permission from me. I am happy to discuss these and other policies at any time. Required Texts: -Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, tr. Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang, 2010. -Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014. The rest of the readings are available as PDFs on Trunk, unless otherwise indicated. All readings should be read in advance of the session to which they correspond. Readings are required unless otherwise indicated. Please be sure to print out texts under discussion and bring them to class. Note well: the reading load varies. Please plan accordingly. A selection of additional recommended titles will be put on reserve at Tisch Library. 2
Schedule of Discussions and Readings: Please note: the following plan is provisional. This is the kind of course where it may be desirable to alter the emphasis and coverage of sessions as we go along. We may well end up covering fewer topics than announced below in order to give the topics we do cover the thought they deserve. Week 1 / 1.22 Introduction: Perception and Experience John Burnside, Diary, London Review of Books 36.24 (18 December 2014): 38-39. Oliver Sacks, Salvitur Ambulando, in A Leg to Stand On (New York, 1984), 137-50. Richard L. Gregory, Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing (Princeton, 1997 [1966]), 1-67. Week 2 / 1.26 Mediation: An Anthropology of Images Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body (Princeton, 2011), 9-61, 84-103, 111-114. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley, 1993), 1-13. Trevor Paglen, Friends of Space, How Are You All? Have You Eaten Yet? Or, Why Talk to Aliens Even if We Can t, Afterall 32 (Spring 2013): 9-19. Week 3 / 2.2 Mediation: The First Image Whitney Davis, The Origins of Image Making, in Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psychoanalysis (University Park, PA, 1996), 46-65. David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art (London, 2002), selection. W.J.T. Mitchell, There Are No Visual Media, Journal of Visual Culture 4.2 (2005): 257-266. Week 4 / 2.9 Image and Belief Georges Didi-Huberman, The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph of a Stain), October 29 (Summer 1984): 63-81. 3
Diane L. Eck, Darśan: Seeing the Divine in India (Chambersburg, Pa., 1981), selection. David Morgan, The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (Berkeley, 2005), selection. Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (Durham, 2007), selection. Week 5 / 2.19 (Thursday) Ethics of the Image: Faces Jenny Edkins, Dismantling the Face: Landscape for another Politics? Society and Space 31 (2013): 538-53. E. H. Gombrich, The Mask and the Face: The Perception of Physiognomic Likeness in Life and in Art (1970), in The Image and the Eye: Further Studies in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. London, Phaidon: 1982, p. 105-136. T. J. Clark, World of Faces, London Review of Books 36.23 (4 December 2014): 16-18. Emmanuel Levinas, selection. Simon Citchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Oxford, 1992), selection. Eyes Without a Face, dir. Georges Franju (1960) -FIRST WRITING ASSIGNMENT DUE IN CLASS 2.19- Week 6 / 2.23 Seeing Gender, Seeing Race (7pm-9pm) Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen 16.3 (1975): 6-18. Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Women (London, 1991), selection. Frantz Fanon, White Skins, Black Masks [1952], tr. Richard Philcox (New York, 2008), selection. Stuart Hall, The Whites of their Eyes: Racist Ideologies of the Media, in Silver Linings: Some Strategies for the Eighties, ed. R. Blunt (London, 1981). 4
Kobena Mercer, Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (London, 1994) Week 7 / 3.2 Politics of the Image: Violence and Authority Michel Foucault, Las Meninas, The Order of Things (1966), 1-16. Zainab Bahrani, An Archaeology of Violence and The King s Head, in Rituals of War: The Body and Violence in Mesopotamia (New York, 2008), 9-55. Steven Nelson, Nelson Mandela s Two Bodies, Transition 116 (2014): 130-42. -VISIT TO TUFTS UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY TBD - Week 8 / 3.9 Michael Nyman Exhibition, Tufts University Art Gallery Man with a Movie Camera, dir. Dziga Vertov (1929) John MacKay, A Revolution in Film, Artforum (April 2011): 196-203. John MacKay, Man with a Movie Camera, 1-31. Malcolm Turvey, Vertov, the View from Nowhere, and the Expanding Circle, October 148 (Spring 2014): 79-102. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth-Century (Chicago, 1983), selection. Week 9 / 3.16 Week 10 / 3.23 NO CLASS: SPRING BREAK NO CLASS (rescheduled for gallery visit) Week 11 / 3.30 Mediation: Writing Photography Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography [1981] (New York, 2010 [1982]). Jacques Rancière, Notes on the Photographic Image, Radical Philosophy 156 (July/August 2009): 8-15. Belting, An Anthropology of Images, 120-124. - SECOND WRITING ASSIGNMENT DUE 3PM FRIDAY 4.3-5
Week 12 / 4.6 Vision and Cultural Difference Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962), selection. Michael Baxandall, The Period Eye, in Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Florence (London, 1972), selection. Finbarr Barry Flood, Between Cult and Culture: Bamiyan, Islamic Iconoclasm, and the Museum, The Art Bulletin, 84.4 (2002): 641-59. Chris Pinney, Notes from the Surface of the Image: Photography, Postcolonialism, and Vernacular Modernism, in Photography s Other Histories, ed. C. Pinney and N. Peterson (Durham, 2003), 202-20. Fred Myer, Ontologies of the Image and Economies of Exchange, American Ethnologist 31.1 (February 2004): 1-16. Week 13 / 4.13 The Limits of the Visual: Image, Word, and Thought Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis, 2014). Darby English, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (Cambridge, MA, 2007), selection. Week 14 / 4.20 NO CLASS: UNIVERSITY HOLIDAY Week 15 / 4.27 Conclusions: What is Visual Studies? Martin Heidegger, The Age of the World Picture [1938], in The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays (New York, 1977). T. J. Clark, Art History in an Age of Image-Machines, EurAmerica 38.1 (March 2008): 1-30. Alexander R. Galloway, The Unworkable Interface, New Literary History 39.4 (Fall 2008): 931-955. Additional Readings TBD. - FINAL WRITING ASSIGNMENT DUE 3PM FRIDAY 5.1-6