CC 205: Word and Image (Humanities: Fine Arts Requirement)

CC 205: Word and Image (Humanities: Fine Arts Requirement)

3 Credits
Section A: MWF 9:00-9:50 am – Professor Buggeln

Human beings are image makers. We represent and communicate what we see, imagine, and understand in words and pictures. This course introduces students to certain problems in the history of visual and literary representation from Plato to the present. The course is divided into three sections. The first focuses on questions regarding the truth and authority of representations. The second section explores aesthetics, especially the rise of modern ways of seeing in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe and America. Finally, we will consider the ethical or moral duty of makers of images and texts in the modern world. Among the variety of questions that we will consider this semester are: What is this human practice of representation, and how do words and images operate? Can words claim legitimacy that images may not and vice-versa? What do makers of representations owe their viewers/readers?