Thursday, January 3, 2008

Visual Narratives

A fellow student sent me her syllabus for a spring course that seems to be designed to fit my creative and academic (are those separate? opposing?) interests. Unfortunately, its in the middle of the day, which means one can't work a non-academic job and attend class.

In celebration of wishful thinking, here's the list:

Course Description

This graduate seminar is designed to facilitate a deeper understanding of relationships between image and text within contemporary narrative forms including hypertext, multimedia and 20th Century experimental literary and art movements such as DADA, Oulipo and Fluxus, and to see how these movements anticipate and configure creative web content. We will focus upon narrative structure in “post-realist” literature.

Texts (books to acquire, all paperback) (All texts in order of appearance)

•Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction, David Hopkins

•If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino

•Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, George Perec

•This Is Not a Pipe, Michel Foucault

•Networked Art, Craig Saper

•Writing Machines, Katherine Hayles

Texts (on D2L)

•Locus Solus (excerpt), Raymond Roussel (chapter 3)

•The DADA Reader: A critical Anthology, Dawn Ales-editor (various)

•Women In DADA, Naomi Sawelson-Gorse-editor (chapter on Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven)

•Oulipo Compendium , Harry Mathews & Alastair Brotchie (various)

•Oulipo – A Primer of Potential Literature, Warren Motte Jr. (various)

•Exercises in Style, Raymond Queneau, (excerpt)

•Ways of Seeing, John Berger (Chapter 1)

•Maps of the Imagination: The Writer As Cartographer (excerpt: A Rigorous Geometry)

•Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin

•Wanderlust (Chapter 12: Paris, Or Botanizing On the Asphalt), Rebecca Solnit

•Fluxus Experience, Hannah Higgins (excerpt)

•Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges (various)

•Mr Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, Lawrence Weschler (chapter 1)

•Database Aesthetic, Victoria Vesna-editor (various)

•The Vintage Book of Amnesia, Jonathan Lethem-editor (Murakami story, Worth story)

•House of Leaves, Mark Danielewski (excerpt)

•The Shaping of Hypertextual Narrative, Sergio Cicconi (on web)

•Incidence, Daniil Kharms (excerpt)

•The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan & Fiore

•Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millenium (chapters 12 & 14)

Films

•The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes (VHS video) (Golda Meir media, Episode 2)

•Experimental Avant Garde Series (various) (English Department Film Library) (various)

•The Five Obstructions, Jorgen Leth & Lars Von Trier (DVD)

•Powers of Ten, Charles and Ray Eames (VHS video)

•How To Draw a Bunny, John Walter & Andrew Moore (DVD)

•Memento, Christopher Nolan