Here is my syllabus introduction to AVT 395 / Writing for Artists:
Welcome to AVT 395-–a writing class for AVT students that approaches language from a studio arts perspective. We’ll move back and forth between the writing lab and atelier over the course of the semester, treating text as both a verbal and visual medium. We won’t just write words--we’ll cut and paste them; paint them; collage them; deform, blog, compute, and code them; even eat them. Writing across media and technologies in this way goes hand in glove with writing across genres. We’ll read and in many cases produce encyclopedic entries, analytic essays, image descriptions, SMS poems, artists’ and treated books, cut-ups and codework. We’ll look at how the medium shapes the message: why you might want to text message a haiku but not an epic poem; or blog a movie review, your favorite rap lyrics—even a serial novel--but not necessarily the Freemason’s handshake or a multivolume treatise. And we won’t neglect grammar, the formal system underlying our use of language. Grammar too often gets a bad rap these days, in part because it is perceived as a straitjacket for renegade prose. But grammar, as we shall see, is as much an analytical, creative, and generative tool as it is a prescriptive tool.
An important theme of the course is the relationship between word and image. Traditionally that relationship has been expressed as a paragone, or contest, between the arts. But the word-image dynamic can be collaborative as well as adversarial. Sometimes, for example, one art survives by piggybacking off another: there are lost paintings that have descended to us in verse; and perhaps—just perhaps—spoken words in the grooves of an antique clay pot (trying to recover these archeological sounds is the task of an emergent field known as paleoacoustics).
Writing for Artists wouldn’t be complete without an excursion into the book arts. The book as material object figures prominently in the syllabus and coursework. We’ll establish a baseline definition of book and then do our best to test its tensile strain through a series of related readings and assignments.
Posted by karik at January 18, 2004 11:11 PM | TrackBackThis class sounds fantastic, Kari. Do you have an idea of what kinds of students will be taking it?
Thanks, George. It's a required writing course for upper-level Art and Visual Technology students. I'll have about eighteen or twenty juniors and seniors, and I expect them all to be AVT majors. I'm nervous and excited. What they don't know is how much bibliotextual studies I'm slipping in under the radar. The whole book arts unit, for example, could be sub-titled "Textual Criticism and Analytical Bibliography from a Studio Arts Perspective" or some such. But that's bibliography broadly conceived. As Matt has said, bibliography is one of the most sophisticated forms of media studies we've evolved.
This does look like a really interesting class. Don't you want to teach it at Maryland? Seriously, the fact that you are putting in biblitextual studies is great. Bibliography may be one of the more sophisticated forms of media studies, but students often (erroneously) think it's the least exciting.
Speaking of . . . I'm going out right now to buy that edible book. What better way to teach your kids the joy of reading than to teach them to stick it in their mouths?
"Speaking of . . . I'm going out right now to buy that edible book. What better way to teach your kids the joy of reading than to teach them to stick it in their mouths?"
Now that's what I call enlightened parenting--childrearing after my own heart :-) I bought my niece _Eat This Book_ for Christmas. She wouldn't have anything to do with the turkey and stuffing but thought the FooDoodler was the greatest thing since sliced bread.