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First-Year Writing Seminar: Collage: From Art to Life and Back
| Semester and Year | FA 2012 |
| Course Number | FIRST-UG361 |
| Section | 001 |
| Instructor | Eugene Vydrin |
| Days | Mon,Wed |
| Time | 2:00 PM - 3:15 PM |
| Units | 4.0 |
| Level | U |
| Foundation Requirement |
Notes/Restrictions
Open to Gallatin first-year students only.
Description
This writing seminar will explore the implications of making the new from the ready-made, of constructing one’s own from what was—and remains—somebody else's. Collage aims at reintegrating art and life, so we will examine collage works that comment on existing society, critique its values and forms of representation and demand their revision. By selecting heterogeneous elements from remote areas of culture, high and low, and juxtaposing them on a single plane, collage disrupts conventional associations and traditional narratives, collapses oppositions, scrambles classifications, and levels hierarchies. What new meanings do the fragments and quotations acquire from these radical juxtapositions, and how does their assemblage contest the mythologies of the culture from which they were taken? The class will consist of several case studies in verbal and visual collage placed in relation to a set of political and aesthetic ideas, which we will derive from a series of theoretical texts. Theorists may include Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, John Berger, Dick Hebdige, and Marjorie Perloff. Collages may include poetry by T. S. Eliot, Susan Howe, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, as well as artworks by Hannah Hoch, Romare Bearden, and Robert Rauschenberg.
Syllabus
Course Type
First-Year Program: Writing Seminars (FIRST-UG)
