Loretta Innocenti, Università Ca' Foscari di Venezia
The course will examine a long-debated issue: parallelism between the arts. Relationships between literature and the visual arts (and music) will be examined from an historical point of view, from the Renaissance to the modern era, which has been marked by the disappearance of interart boundaries.
Aims
At the end of the term students will be expected to gain an in-depth understanding of the problems of verbal and visual representation. They are also expected to acquire a knowledge of different literary contexts, which will be closely analysed through the comparison of poetry with other arts of the same period.
Course outline
| Week 1 |
General introduction. The concept of Zeitgeist: likenesses in different arts of the same period. Are the arts comparable? |
| Week 2 |
European Renaissance. An analogical world picture. The sister arts. |
Week 3 |
Allegorical texts made of words and images: emblems and masques.
The art of memory. Meditation. |
| Week 4 |
Poetry which tends to the visual: description of paintings, verbal portraits. |
| Week 5 |
Poetry which tends to the visual: description of places, estate poems. |
| Week 6 |
Poetry which tends to the visual: pattern poems, iconicity. |
| Week 7 |
The sense of sight and poetry. Perception: linear perspective and distorted vision (anamorphosis). Extasies and visions. |
| Week 8 |
Puritan iconoclasm: the attack on images. Effects on theatre and poetry. |
| Week 9 |
The division of the arts: Winkelmann's aesthetics and Lessing's Laokoon (1766). Spatial and temporal arts. |
| Week 10 |
Modernist and avant-garde world view. Experiments in time and space: Simultaneity. |
| Week 11 |
Movement and speed in the arts. New instruments and new languages. The techniques of collage and montage in literature and in the cinema. |
Week 12 |
Contemporary examples of relations between word and image and of interart texts. |
Readings
- Frank, J., “Spatial Form in Modern Literature”, in Sewanee Review , 53, 1945, pp. 221-240; 433-456; 643-653 (collected in The Idea of Spatial Form , New Brunswick, 1991).
- Gilman, E., 198, The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Sevenettenth century , Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1978.
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Gilman, E., Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation , The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1986.
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Innocenti, L., “Iconoclasm and Iconicity in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry”, in The Motivated Sign. Iconicity in Language and Literature 2 , a cura di O. Fischer e M. Nänny, Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 2001, pp. 211-225.
- Innocenti, L., 1999 “‘Language thou art too narrow': Reflections on Visual and Verbal Iconicity”, in Textus , XII, pp. 11-36.
- Praz, M., 1954 “Modern Art and Literature. A Parallel”, in English Miscellany , V, pp. 217-245.
- Praz, M., 1970 Mnemosyne. The Parallel Between Literature and the Visual Arts, Princeton University Press, Princeton (trad.it.: Mnemosyne. Parallelo tra la letteratura e le arti visive , Mondadori, Milano, 1971).
Loretta Innocenti Full professor of English Literature at Ca' Foscari where she is Vice Provost for International Relations. Has been teaching courses on different topics, focusing mainly on Renaissance literature (Shakespeare and Elizabethan theatre, Milton, Seventeenth-century poetry, metaphysical poetry, etc.). Worked extensively on Sterne's novels, on humour in eighteenth-century narrative, especially Smollett's and Austen's, and on Eighteenth-century linguistic theories. More recently her work has mainly focused on the relation of word and image. She first studied the Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century English emblems, as mnemonic and rhetorical texts ( Vis eloquentiae. Emblematica e persuasione , Sellerio, Palermo 1983), and more recently she has been concerned with a more general concept of "visuality", as a model of perception and representation. Also worked on Elizabethan theatre ( Il teatro elisabettiano , Il Mulino, Bologna 1994), on neoclassical theatre ( La scena trasformata. Adattamenti neoclassici di Shakespeare , Sansoni, Firenze 1985), and on the contemporary scene. Her research is at present focused on Seventeenth-century literature. She planned 6 International Seminars on "The Orient in Western Arts (1700-2000)”, which were realized in 2002 and 2003 in different Italian towns (Naples, Florence, Rome, and Venice). |
fall
2005