INSTRUCTOR: HELEN TASCHIAN, WINTER 2009

READING SCHEDULE
(Please complete all the readings prior to the first date for which they are assigned)

WEEK 1: JANUARY 5 & 7

Intertextuality: There's no such thing as an original image
• Carl Matheson: The Simpsons, Hyper-Irony and the Meaning of Life

Course introduction: Defining visual literacy as a general construct.
The intertext, the hypotext and the hypertext as a general framework for considering visual literacy

WEEK 2: JANUARY 12 & 14

Understanding Mediation: photography and cinema
• John Berger: Ways of Seeing
• Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Definitions of mediation. Technology as a force of cultural change. Issues of mechanical reproduction. The medium as an ideological choice. The ‘aura’ of the work of art.
Political implications in the mediated image - Riefenstahl, Berkeley, Lang, Shakespeare’s Henry V.

WEEK 3: JANUARY 21 (HOLIDAY MONDAY, JANUARY 19)

Censorship & Obscenity
• Lynda Nead: “Framing the Female Body”
• Lynda Nead: “A Discourse on the Naked and the Nude”
• Lynda Nead: “A Study of Ideal Art”
• Lynda Nead: “Aesthetics and the Female Nude”
• Lynda Nead: “Obscenity and the Sublime”
• Lynda Nead: “Erotic Art: A Frame for Desire”

The constructed space of the female nude in art. Censorship, obscenity, and the First Amendment.

WEEK 4: JANUARY 26 & 28

Fictional and Documentary Space: Blurring the difference
• Edward Branigan: “Fiction”
• Vivian Sobchack: “On the Death of a Rabbit in Fictional Space”

Fictional and documentary space in photography. The verbal supplement. Manipulated documents, fictions which aim at reality. The real and the irreal in film. Issues of fiction and document in film – Jean Renoir, Robert Flaherty, D.W. Griffith, Gillo Pontecorvo, Haskell Wexler, Errol Morris, Michael Moore and Jean-Luc Godard.

WEEK 5: FEBRUARY 2 & 4 (PAPER #1 DUE WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 4)

From Passive to Active Spectatorship: ‘the Spectator as Producer’
• Raman Selden and Peter Widdowson: “Reader-oriented theories,” from A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory: 4th Edition, Prentice Hall, pp. 46-69.
• Henry Jenkins: “‘Strangers No More We Sing’: Filking and the Social Construction of the Science Fiction Fan Community”

Positioning the spectator through scopic space: from Renaissance perspective to postmodernism.
Empowering the spectator as the ‘author’ of the text/image.

WEEK 6: FEBRUARY 9 & 11

A Brief Introduction to Semiotics: genre and advertising codes
• Daniel Chandler: Semiotics for Beginners: Codes
• Roland Barthes: “The World of Wrestling”
• Roland Barthes: “The Romans in Films”
• Roland Barthes: “The Brain of Einstein”
• Roland Barthes: “Plastic”

Basic semiotics: referent, sign, signifier, signified. Roland Barthes’ five narrative codes. Denotative and connotative meaning. Interplay of signs as a braid. Signs and codes within the structure of the western – examples of how these concepts function using the genre film as an example.

WEEK 7: FEBRUARY 18 (HOLIDAY MONDAY, FEBRUARY 16)

Advertising: The Manufacturing of Desire
• Raymond Williams: "Advertising: The Magic System"
• Edisol Wayne Dotson: “Buy Me Advertising”
• Jeane Kilbourne: “In Your Face...All Over the Place”
• Jeane Kilbourne: “Please, Please, You're Driving Me Wild”
• Jeane Kilbourne: “The More You Subtract the More You Add”
• Jeane Kilbourne: “Forget the Rules! Enjoy the Wine”
• Jeane Kilbourne: “What You're Looking For”
• Jeane Kilbourne: “In Life There are Many Loves, but Only One Grand Passion”
• Jeane Kilbourne: “You Talkin' To Me”
• Jeane Kilbourne: “Two Ways A Woman Can Get Hurt”

Deconstructing advertising: probing the gap between what is promised and what is actually communicated and delivered

WEEK 8: FEBRUARY 23 & 25

Hidden Mediations: Racism, Sexism & Orientalism
• Linda Nochlin: “The Imaginary Orient”
• Ella Shohat and Robert Stam: “The Imperial Imaginary”
• Ella Shohat and Robert Stam: “Tropes of Empire”

Deconstructing Western assumptions about Otherness. How images are always ideologically inflected.

WEEK 9: MARCH 2& 4

Postmodern paradigms I: Simulacra & the Culture of the Copy
• Jean Baudrillard: Simulacra and Simulation (Excerpts)
• Robert Miklitsch: “Total Recall: Production, Revolution, Simulation-Alienation Effect”
• Steven Shaviro: “Bodies of Fear: David Cronenberg”

Copies as a contemporary normative form in art. Copies, appropriations and simulacra. The intertext in an expanded definition. The human body as a copy in film – Metropolis, Frankenstein, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Blade Runner, Dead Ringers, Being John Malkovich.

WEEK 10: MARCH 9 & 11 (PAPER #2 DUE WEDNESDAY, MARCH 11)

Technocultures and Cyberspace
• Marcos Novak: Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace
• Peter Lunenfeld: Technocultures: Commodity Camaraderie
• Daniel Harris: The Futuristic

The impact of new technology on visual production and visual culture. The artist as engineer. Interactivity, digital effects, the internet, new media.

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