Visual Culture
Code
73217172
Academic unit
Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas
Department
Línguas, Culturas e Literaturas Modernas
Credits
6
Weekly hours
2
Teaching language
Portuguese
Objectives
Learning outcomes: The seminar aims to introduce the student to the study of visual culture by focusing on the core theories that frame the field of studies whilst developing the ability to analyse visual artifacts and understand the technological details that construct them (framing, light, speed, cutting and sequencing). It further aims to provide the skills that will make the student able to contextualize and interpret the object of study and to place it comparatively within the larger body of cultural studies. Competencies: Apart from advanced communication and written skills, the seminar aims to foster visual understanding, that builds from the ability to read, place in context and interpret visual artifacts. Furthermore the seminar aims to develop in the student intercultural competencies arising from a comparative approach to images and contribute to foster a critical reasoning supported by informed academic arguments.
Prerequisites
Subject matter
I What is Visual Culture and what do images want?
1.. Visual Culture, visuality and visibility.
2. What is visual literacy?
II Literacy, Modernity and Visuality.
1. Urban culture and modern visuality
2. Making the modern in the age of reproduction: film and photography.
3. Panoptical modernity and the perverse gaze.
4. From modernity to post-modernity: pastiche, bricolage and the virtual world.
III The Power of Images
1. The image system: production, selection, framing, distribution, reception
2. Emotion and cognition: what images do.
3. Visuality and desire.
IV The Visual Construction of Otherness.
4. The visual invention of the West.
5. Imperial images and post-colonial visions.
6. Visual identities (gender, race, class).
7. Images in the global diaspora flow.
V Visual literacy, citizenship and the right to look.
1. Photography and death (Baudelaire; Barthes, Sebald, Balufuks)
2. Images malgré tout: representing the Holocaust.
Bibliography
BARTHES, Roland: La chambre claire. Note sur la photographie, Paris: Cahiers du Cinema, Seuil, 1980.
CRARY, Jonathan, Suspensions of Perception. Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture, Boston: MIT Press, 1999.
DIDI-HUBERMAN, Georges: Images malgré tout, Paris: Editions du Minuit, 2005.
ELKINS, James (ed.): Visual Literacy, London: Routledge, 2009.
FOUCAULT, Michel, Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison, Gallimard: Paris, 1990.
GIL, Isabel Capeloa : Literacia Visual. Estudos Sobre a Inquietude das Imagens, Lisboa: Edições 70, 2011.
KRAUSS, Rosalind, The Optical Unconscious, New Haven: MIT Press, 1994.
MIRZOEFF, Nicholas: Introduction to Visual Culture, London: Routledge, 2009
MITCHELL, W.J.T.: What do Pictures Want?, Chicago: Chicago U. Press, 2006.
SONTAG, Susan, On Photography, Middelesex: Penguin, 1998.
STURKEN, Marita; Lisa Cartwright: Practices of Looking. An Introduction to Visual Culture, Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2003.
Teaching method
Teaching Methodologies: The seminar will consist of lecturing, joint discussion of assigned reading and
practical analysis of visual objects. Sessions will promote practice-based learning and bring together the close reading of theoretical texts with visual analysis.
Evaluation method
Evaluation: Evaluation is based on the principle of continuous and progressive assessment. It will assess
students skills in producing an autonomous and coherent critical discourse and the ability to develop original and theoretically sound approaches to the study of images. Participation is particularly encouraged. Students who fail to attend 2/3 of sessions will not pass. Assignments for the course include close reading of texts and a series of exercises of visual analysis. Learning assessment is based on the following items and percentages:
- Continuous assessment (participation and oral presentations) 30%
- Term paper (15 pages, double spaced, Times New Roman 12; MLA citation rules) 70%