ART 345 - Topics in the History of Book Illustration: The Book as Subject

Institution:

Washington University in St Louis

Subject:

Description:

Within the last half-century, the book has moved from periphery to center, becoming the subject of an expanding body of work by writers and artists. Its formal qualities and physical processes, its habitual means of organizing, its strengths, its limitations and the meanings we attach to them, have become the subject of seemingly self-conscious, inward-looking books. Postmodern as if by definition, playfulness and irony attend these works and their complexities and subtleties often prove elusiveness a virtue. They command a reshaping of our sense of how books, texts, and illustrations react to and interact with one another and how a reader/viewer experiences and makes sense of them. We look at work by Vladimir Nabokov, Julio Cortazar, Italo Calvino, William H. Gass, Samuel Beckett, Jasper Johns, Tom Phillips, Anselm Kiefer, Susan Baron, Peter Greenaway, and others. This seminar explores aspects of the history of image and text conjoined in the western book, at once an object and a concept, a thing experienced and a conduit, a means of transmission. Utilizing a variety of analytical and critical approaches-psychoanalytical, deconstructive, New Historicist-we examine the ways in which texts and images make and unmake meanings. Students are asked to write two papers, one brief (six to eight pages), the other more extended (12 to 20 pages) and to give one in-class presentation.

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.wustl.edu

Phone Number:

(314) 935-5000

Regional Accreditation:

North Central Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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