Instructor: Lester Faigley
TTH 9:30-10:45 * PAR 104 * #35655

Since the early decades of the nineteenth century, when advances in printing, paper manufacture, and engraving made cheap, mass-produced images broadly available, Western culture has been characterized as a visual culture. During the twentieth century visual technologies proliferated, especially in new electronic forms. In the last decade the World Wide Web has made possible for individuals to publish multimedia texts that formerly required entire production departments and studios.

In spite of the proliferation of images in our culture and the ease of producing and publishing them, they remain a neglected area of study within the humanities. In the first half of the course we will read some of the major thinkers on modern visual culture including Barthes, Benjamin, Berger, Lanham, Mitchell, and Sontag along with looking at iconic images of public culture. In the second half we will focus more particularly on the trajectory of the rise of illustrated newspapers and new image technologies in the nineteenth century through new electronic media that leads up to digital imaging and the multimedia Web.

Requirements:

• A forum responding to readings and viewings (30 points)
  
• A major project of article length in a print format or the equivalent in a multimedia format (70 points)

• W. J. T. Mitchell. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. ISBN 0226532321

• Susan Sontag. On Photography. New York: Picador, 2001 (1973). ISBN 031242009

• Handout readings, online essays and multimedia materials