English 278 - The Sister Arts

This course will pair four writers with four painters to explore the relationship between the visual and the verbal arts through theories of representation. The pairs are John Constable and William Wordsworth, the sisters Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, Peter Lanyon and W.S. Graham, and the unrelated Bridget Riley and Denise Riley. By so doing, we will consider the periodizing terms Romanticism, Realism, Modernism, and Postmodernism and how they mediate between individual works of art and historical context. We will be preoccupied with the practices of analyzing individual works of art in concrete detail and of constructing larger, more general, abstract claims.

Prereq: ENGL-199 or 8 credits in English.