Narrating US-Mexico Borderland

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

Literature and the visual arts exist largely as separate cultural and aesthetic categories. There are many works, though, that mix forms from these two categories, examples from books to paintings, to video, to digitally animated text, that combine pictures, drawings or other graphic elements with printed words or text. Such combinatorial strategies have been common in advertising and in other popular forms like comics for decades. Increasingly, they are now used to literary ends, in work, that in aggregate, seems to conform to a new, hybrid category--a visual literature. While it can be argued that examples of visual literature can be found in many historical periods, the application of the term to work of the last hundred years or so seems to be the most productive, given the unusually wide range of examples, and especially given the recent proliferation of electronic forms that demonstrate a similar hybridity. More specifically, this class will focus on contemporary “visual“ literature and spillover forms in sound art and performance and consider their implications. We will be especially interested in understanding how so-called visual works merge the traditions of literature and the visual arts and challenge the way we read, view and value aesthetic objects, in a culture increasingly dominated by technology, as seen on the Internet, on television, in film, video and graphic images. Additionally, we will explore the concept of “visual rhetoric,” the ways in which visual materials become evidential and persuasive as they parallel verbal language. The course material, as well as the concepts we will discuss and develop in class, will be the basis for two writing assignments. Correspondingly, we will discuss topic and thesis development, paper organization and research and examine a variety of secondary sources that will help us situate our comments and critiques. There will also be a mid-term exam.