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MLitt Module

Literature and Visual Culture

Module Tutor: Professor Andrew Roberts

This module explores the interaction between literature and visual culture, and so between conceptions of the 'picture' or 'image' on the one hand, and the 'text' on the other. It focuses on how visual-textual relations have been understood within aesthetics and critical theory, as well as their manifestation in fiction, poetry and hybrid cross-medial / intermedial works (such as digital poetry). It is particularly suitable for those intending to progress to postgraduate research in the expanding field around the intersection of literature and visuality.

Critical and Theoretical Texts

Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture (Routledge, 1999)

Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies (Sage, 2001)

Jean-Michel Rabaté (ed), Writing the Image after Roland Barthes (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997)

Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe, 1900-1916 (Clarendon Press, 1994)

W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (University of Chicago Press, 1994)
W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology (University of Chicago Press, 1986)
W.J.T. Mitchell (ed), The Language of Images (University of Chicago Press, 1980)

Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (1970; London: Random House / Pimlico, 1999), pp. 211-244.

Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: the Denigration of Vision in 20th-Century French Thought (University of California Press, 1993)

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (BBC / Penguin, 1972)

Literary Texts

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Mina Loy, selected poems

Erwin Mortier, Shutterspeed, trans. Ina Rilke (Harvill Secker, 2008)

W.F. Hermans, The Darkroom of Damocles, trans. Ina Rilke (Harvill Secker, 2008)

Gabriel Josipovici, Contre-Jour: A Tript ych After Pierre Bonnard (Carcanet Press, 1986)

William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience

John Cayley, overboard and lens, both at: http://homepage.mac.com/shadoof/net/in/

Brian Kim Stefans, The Dream Life of Letters, at http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/stefans__the_dreamlife_of_letters/dreamlife_index.html

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