Word and Image: Creative Encounters across Cultures and Media (Level 5)

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 5
• Convenor: Dr Ann Lewis
• Tutors: Professor Mari Paz Balibrea, Dr Peter Damrau, Dr Nicolette David, Dr Irene Gonzalez Lopez, Professor Akane Kawakami, Dr Ann Lewis, Dr Michael Tsang
• Assessment: a 2500-word essay (50%) and three-hour in-class test (50%)

In this module, you will be able to develop your interest in visual culture, building on your experience of other modules, by exploring the complexities of the relationship between word and image in a number of different configurations.

Spanning a range of periods and cultures (e.g. French, German, Korean, Japanese, Spanish), the module adopts a comparative approach and stages a series of word/image encounters between literature and visual art, photography and film. These include topics such as: writing on art in the eighteenth century (Diderot), representing hell in Blake’s interpretation of Dante, mediamorphosis in cinematic approaches to Kafka, photography and lifewriting in the works of Barthes, Guibert and Ernaux, adapting and remaking memories of postwar Japan in Seichō’s Point Zero and Kaykyo’s Fugitive from the Past, amongst others.

Engaging with these materials will allow you to develop your analytical skills and to explore various critical frameworks, key words and debates relevant to the text/image relationship such as ekphrasis, iconotextuality, adaptation and intermediality.

Indicative syllabus

• Dante and the visual arts
• Diderot and the tableau: writing art criticism in the eighteenth century
• Mediamorphosis: Franz Kafka and cinematic perspectives on modernity
• Photography and the novel: W.G. Sebald and the assertion of reality
• Photography and life writing: Barthes and Guibert
• Photography and life writing: Guibert and Ernaux
• Cármenes of Spain: a symbol across word and image in gender and national perspective
• Gender and South Korean society: adapting Kim Ji-young, born 1982
• Adapting and remaking memories of postwar Japan I: Zero Shoten (Point Zero, Matsumoto Seichō)
• Adapting and remaking memories of postwar Japan II: Kiga Kaykyo (Fugitive from the Past, Minakami Tsutomu)

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

• understand the complex interplay between word and image in a range of contexts (e.g. writing on art, such as illustration of literary texts, photography and lifewriting, photography and the novel, film adaptations and remakes and other forms of word/image crossover)
• demonstrate knowledge of the prescribed illustrated and adapted texts, films and other ‘iconotexts’ under discussion, their contexts, and the issues raised by concepts like ekphrasis, intermediality, adaptation
• evaluate the prescribed texts/cultural artefacts at a thematic as well as visual, linguistic and stylistic level
• work within historical and theoretical frameworks in the interpretation of the prescribed texts/images.