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Fall 2000 Monday/Wednesday/Friday 9:05-9:55am Peterson Hall 104
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Cynthia Chris, Lecturer cchris@ucsd.edu office: MCC 247 office hour: Monday 10:15-11:15am
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This course will examine the historical role of visual images, especially since the "age of mechanical reproduction," from the advent of photography to new digital media and medical imaging systems. We will consider the apparently heightened role of visual images in modernity and postmodernity, emphasizing the socially constructed nature of visual experience, and the analysis of visual elements of imaging technologies such as photography, film, television, and digital media.
Texts: Two required textbooks are available at Groundworks Bookstore in the Old Student Center. The books are:
The Visual Culture Reader (referred to on syllabus as VCR)
Nicholas Mirzoeff, ed.
New York: Routledge, first pub. 1998, reprint 1999
Picturing the Past: Media, History & Photography (referred to as PTP)
Bonnie Brennen & Hanno Hardt, eds.
Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999
A course reader is also required; University Readers will sell it at the end of the first few class meetings; please bring cash or check. To arrange an alternate opportunity to purchase the reader, call (619) 540-8789.
Requirements: Attendance is required at all scheduled class meetings. The midterm and final exams will cover material discussed and screened in lecture as well as course readings. Readings should be completed before the first class meeting of the week under which they are listed.
Your grade is based on the following: attendance and participation (10%); a midterm exam (30%); a short paper (30%); and a final exam (30%).
The paper will require you to analyze visual aspects of a media object to be determined and to draw on an unassigned chapter from either PTP or VCR. You will receive more specific instructions well in advance of the due date. The format and dates of the exams and the paper are tentative.
WEEK ZERO
Friday, September 22
Introduction to the Course: What Is Visual Culture?
WEEK ONE
Monday, September 25 / Wednesday, September 27 / Friday, September 29
Ways of Seeing, or, Vision as Social Practice
Nicholas Mirzoeff, "What Is Visual Culture?" in VCR (pp. 3-13)
Valerie Hartouni, "Impaired Sight or Partial Vision?" in reader
David Harvey, "Modernity and Modernism" and "Postmodernism" in reader
WEEK TWO
Monday, October 2 / Wednesday, October 4 / Friday, October 6
More Ways of Seeing, or, Vision as a Historical Process
Michael Baxandall, "The Period Eye" in reader
Robert L. Craig, "Fact, Public Opinion and Persuasion" in PTP (pp. 36-59)
Roland Barthes, "Rhetoric of Images" in VCR (pp. 70-73)
Tim Mitchell, "Orientalism and the Visionary Order" in VCR (pp. 293-303)
WEEK THREE
Monday, October 9 / Wednesday, October 11 / Friday, October 13
Visual Power: Panopticism and Positionality
Michel Foucault, "Panopticism" in reader[Robert Frank: The Americans at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park ends Sunday, October 15. Free admission Tuesday, October 10.]
Donna Haraway, "The Persistence of Vision" in reader
Paul Virilio, "Candid Camera" in reader
WEEK FOUR
Monday, October 16 / Wednesday, October 18 / Friday, October 20
Seeing Double: Photography and the Multiplying Image
Susan Sontag, "In Plato's Cave" in readerMIDTERM: Friday, October 20
Dona Schwarz, "Objective Representation: Photographs as Facts" in PTP (pp. 158-181)
[Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000 opens at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Sunday, October 22]
WEEK FIVE
Monday, October 23 / Wednesday, October 25 / Friday, October 27
Surface Tension: Visualizing the Body
Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" in reader
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in reader
WEEK SIX
Monday, October 30 / Wednesday, November 1 / Friday, November 3
Representations of Race
Shawn Michelle Smith, "Photographing the 'American Negro' " in reader
Ella Shohat/Robert Stam, "Narrativizing Visual Culture" in VCR (pp. 27-49)
Adrian Piper, "Passing for White, Passing for Black" in VCR (pp. 353-362)
bell hooks, "Representing Whiteness: Seeing Wings of Desire" in VCR (pp. 338-343)
WEEK SEVEN
Monday, November 6 / Wednesday, November 8
Representing Racism
Coco Fusco, "Other Side of Intercultural Performance" in VCR (pp. 363-371)[Tuesday, November 7: Election Day]
Nestor Garcia Canclini, "Remaking Passports" in VCR (pp. 372-381)
Deborah Root, "Conquest, Appropriation, and Cultural Difference" in reader
Friday, November 10: No Class: Veteran's Day Holiday
WEEK EIGHT
Monday, November 13 / Wednesday, November 15 / Friday, November 17
Virtual Utopias: Nature and Narrativity in Visual Culture
Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces" in VCR (pp. 237-244)PAPER DUE: Monday, November 13
Stephen J. Fjellman, "Cinema, Music, Fantasy" in reader
WEEK NINE
Monday, November 20 / Wednesday, November 22
Nature and Narrativity, Continued
John Berger, "Why Look at Animals?" in readerFriday, November 24: No Class: Thanksgiving Holiday
Susan G. Davis, "Dreaming of Whales" in reader
WEEK TEN
Monday, November 27 / Wednesday, November 29 / Friday, December 1
Return to the Surface Tension: Visualizing the Body
Judith Butler, "Gender Is Burning" in VCR (pp. 448-462)
Lisa Cartwright, "The Visible Man" in reader
FINALS WEEK
Exam Period: Wednesday, December 6, 8:00-11:00am
Format of final exam to be announced.
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