Ian Baucom, Duke

From Homer’s description of the gloriously decorated surface of Achille’s shield onward, literature and the visual arts have been in constant traffic with one another. In this course we will examine a series of twentieth-century explorations of the connection between word and image. Starting with Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray we will read a series of novels in which the problem of painting is also the problem of literature. We will also visit the Venice Biennale to examine, in particular, works of contemporary art in which text and writing are the subject of the visual arts.

Week 1. Introduction
Week 2. Begin Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Week 3. Complete Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Week 4. Selections from WJT Mitchell, Picture Theory, Begin Michael Frayn, Headlong
Week 5. Complete Frayn, Headlong
Week 5. Visit the Venice Biennale, (suggested accompanying reading: Lawrence, Alloway, The Venice Biennale, 1895-1968: From Salon to Goldfish Bowl).
Week 6. Discussion of visit to the Biennale.
Week 7. Begin Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red
Week 8. Continue with Pamuk, My Name is Red
Week 9. Complete Pamuk, My Name is Red
Week 10. Begin Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh
Week 11. Continue with Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh
Week 12. Complete Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh

Requirements and Mode of Evaluation
Students are expected to attend and participate in all classes. They will be asked to write three 6-8 page essays. Each essay will count for 30% of the grade; the remaining 10% will be based on class participation. There are no exams.

Biography
B.A. in Political Science (Wake Forest), M.A. in African Studies and Ph.D. in English (Yale). Associate Professor of English and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the English Department of Duke. Member of the Modernist Studies Association committee on Interdisciplinary Studies and Fellow in the British American Partnership. Involved in organising a series of working conferences on the Black British arts scene with the Tate Galleries and the universities of East London and Duke. Was Assistant Professor of English at Yale where he co-curated an exhibition on three Black British artists at the University Art Gallery (title: The Unmapped Body). Author of Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); edited Atlantic Genealogies, a special edition of the “South Atlantic Quarterly” (Spring, 2002). Forthcoming work include: Shades of Black: The London Renaissance, a collection of essays on the black arts scene in post-war Britain, co-edited with Sonia Boyce and David A. Bailey and Afterlives of Romanticism, a special edition of the “South Atlantic Quarterly”, co-edited with Jennifer Kennedy and Anne Rowland (Summer 2003)