Unit information: Writing for Art in 2020/21

Unit name	Writing for Art
Unit code	ENGL39019
Credit points	20
Level of study	H/6
Teaching block(s)	Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24)
Unit director	Dr. Cheeke
Open unit status	Not open
Pre-requisites	None
Co-requisites	None
School/department	Department of English
Faculty	Faculty of Arts

Description including Unit Aims

This unit will explore the relationship between writing and visual art, from 1800 to the present. Topics will include the relation between text and image, the notion of reading a painting, the rivalry that exists between the ‘sister arts’, notions of temporality, questions of aesthetics (beauty and truth), writing that has inspired paintings, the figure of the artist, notions of ‘realism’ and representation, Greek sculpture and Romantic writing, Pre-Raphaelitism, the Victorians and the Renaissance, Aestheticism, photography and literature. Authors to be studied may include: Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, William Hazlitt, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, W.H.Auden, Randall Jarrell, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Don DeLillo, Bernard Malamud, and many contemporary examples.

Aims:

To introduce students to the multiform relations between literature and the plastic arts; to encourage students to explore the theory of such relations; and to focus upon specific author and subject-based examples.

Students will be given the opportunity to submit a draft or outline of their final, summative essay of up to 1,500 words and to receive feedback on this.

Intended Learning Outcomes

On successful completion of this unit students will be able to:

1. demonstrate a detailed knowledge of a range of examples of the relations between writing and visual art, from 1800 to the present;
2. show a critical understanding of the body of theory written in response to such work;
3. demonstrate an understanding of major critical approaches to analysing such work within an interdisciplinary framework of literature and art;
4. analyse and compare primary texts and critical sources;
5. show skills in academic writing, argumentation, and evaluation of evidence from primary texts and critical literature, appropriate to level H/6.

Teaching Information

Teaching will involve asynchronous and synchronous elements, including group discussion, research and writing activities, and peer dialogue. Students are expected to engage with the reading and participate fully with the weekly tasks and topics. Learning will be further supported through the opportunity for individual consultation.

Assessment Information

• 1 x 3500 word essay (100%) [ILOs 1-5]

Reading and References

James Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetry of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993).

John Hollander, The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art (Chicago: Chicago University press, 1995);

Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press, 1992);

W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986);

Stephen Cheeke, Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008).