This class will focus on the complex relationship between the two "Sister Arts"--art and poetry--from the Romantic period to the 1960s. We will examine works of art alongside the poetry that inspired them: selections from Homer's "Odyssey" alongside vases, mosaics, and paintings; William Blake's illustrated books of poetry; Pre-Raphaelite painters' interpretations of poetry by Tennyson and Keats; and Charles Demuth's 1923 painting after a William Carlos Williams poem. And we will also study several poems written as responses to works of art--we call this "ekphrasis" or poetry that describes a work of art. Examples here will include (scenes from) Wallace Stevens' "The Man with the Blue Guitar," Allen Ginsberg's "Cézanne's Ports," Sylvia Plath's "The Disquieting Muses," Anne Sexton's "The Starry Night," and Adrienne Rich's "Mourning Picture," among others. I'm really curious to hear what you think is at stake in the "translation" from one art to another--is anything lost in translation? Or does the original work seem all the richer for it? After a discussion of all these works, students will create both a poem and a piece of artwork (you decide which comes first/which inspires which!)--each related to the other in their own complex ways.

Photography played many roles as an emerging medium in the nineteenth century. Photographs were recognized for their ability to preserve and memorialize (through family and celebrity portraits), to document the great outdoors (used by the photographers of the American West, Carleton Watkins, Ansel Adams, and Timothy O'Sullivan, to record and distribute images of previously unseen American landscapes), and to lay bare man's capacity for violence (c.f. Alexander Gardner's photographs of the Civil War). For all the attention its practitioners paid to exteriors, photography was also an incredibly intimate medium--one that was crucial to shaping the turn-of-century domestic sphere. In this class, we will examine the topic of "photographing the house," focusing on images of pre- and post-WWII domestic spaces, and investigating the radical rift that the 1930s and 40s tore into domestic photography. We turn, first, to the pre-war "domestic detail" of O.V. Lange; the "childhood, whimsy, and play" of Clarence H. White's interiors, and of the Cottingley Fairies photographs (a series of five "doctored" photographs, taken by two cousins of fairies in their garden, which sparked a massive debate in the newspapers as to their veracity--Sir Arthur Conan Doyle even weighed in!). We turn next to the notion of the "Portable" or "Deconstructed House," examining the domestic space pushed to its limits (invaded, uprooted, made portable), through the eyes of: Dorothea Lange's Depression-era photographs of migrants; Jacob Riis's depictions of homelessness (considering the theme of trespassing); Lee Miller's images of domestic rubble and bunkers in the London Blitz; and a haunting WWII photograph taken by David E. Scherman. We will also look at several postwar photographers--Carrie Mae Weems, Sally Mann, and Francesca Woodman--to further trace the dissolution of the domestic sphere. Besides examining the themes mentioned above (documentary, realism, fantasy, trespassing, and dissolution), we shall also seek to understand what it is that the medium of photography offers the domestic sphere that painting and other media cannot. How does photographing an interior reveal something about our own mental interior? After a lecture and discussion, students will have an opportunity to think about how they would approach photographing their own domestic spaces. Who or what would be in your photographs? What corners would you choose to memorialize?

This class will focus on the complex relationship between the two "Sister Arts"--art and poetry--from the Romantic period to the 1960s. We will examine works of art alongside the poetry that inspired them: William Blake's illustrated books of poetry, Pre-Raphaelite painters' interpretations of poetry by Tennyson and Keats, Charles Demuth's 1923 painting after a William Carlos Williams poem, among others... And we will also study several poems written as responses to works of art--we call this "ekphrasis" or poetry that describes a work of art. Examples here will include (scenes from) Virgil's "Aeneid," Wallace Stevens' "The Man with the Blue Guitar," Allen Ginsberg's "Cézanne's Ports," Sylvia Plath's "The Disquieting Muses," Anne Sexton's "The Starry Night," and Adrienne Rich's "Mourning Picture." I'm really curious to hear what you think is at stake in the "translation" from one art to another--is anything lost in translation? Or does the original work seem all the richer for it? After a discussion of all these works, students will create both a poem and a piece of artwork (you decide which comes first/which inspires which!)--each related to the other in their own complex ways.

This class will focus on the complex relationship between the two "Sister Arts"--art and poetry--from the Romantic period to the 1960s. We will examine works of art alongside the poetry that inspired them: William Blake's illustrated books of poetry, Pre-Raphaelite painters' interpretations of poetry by Tennyson and Keats, Charles Demuth's 1923 painting after a William Carlos Williams poem, among others... And we will also study several poems written as responses to works of art--we call this "ekphrasis" or poetry that describes a work of art. Examples here will include (scenes from) Virgil's "Aeneid," Wallace Stevens' "The Man with the Blue Guitar," Allen Ginsberg's "Cézanne's Ports," Sylvia Plath's "The Disquieting Muses," Anne Sexton's "The Starry Night," and Adrienne Rich's "Mourning Picture." I'm really curious to hear what you think is at stake in the "translation" from one art to another--is anything lost in translation? Or does the original work seem all the richer for it? After a discussion of all these works, students will create both a poem and a piece of artwork (you decide which comes first/which inspires which!)--each related to the other in their own complex ways.

As you might know, movies have not always been the fast, action-packed, roaring technicolor fantasies that we know and enjoy today. It was only in the 1930s (and even then, selectively) that movies were shown in color, not black and white. And before that breakthrough was an era of silent film. But what came before then? How did we develop technology to capture motion in the first place? What about sound? In this class, we will look at a broad overview of the crazy technological innovations (mainly from 1851-1877) that led to the creation of the first "moving images." We'll learn about stereoscopes (how people saw 3D images back in 1851), phenakistoscopes and zoetropes (early animation), kineographs (flip books), and the work of the great pioneer, Eadweard Muybridge, who is credited with creating the first ever movie. We'll get a chance to look at some of the mini-films that these wild apparatuses created. I'm really curious to hear what you guys think about these crazy creations, and especially what your experience of time is with these objects. Does time slow down when you watch these "movies"? Does it speed up? Does your notion of time get suspended and stop altogether? Time permitting, we will hopefully have a chance to create our own flip books or phenakistoscopes!

This class will examine artists and writers who were fascinated by the edges of the earth, by dizzy views and dangerous terrains. We'll focus in class on four types of extreme landscape in art and literature: ice, ocean, desert, and mountains. ICE: The harrowing icescapes of Frederic Edwin Church, William Bradford, and Peder Balke. A 100-year-old box of photographs found in Antarctica. Herman Melville's poem about the "Aurora Borealis" alongside Frederic Edwin Church's painting of the same name. 19th century travel books detailing arctic expeditions. Interactive panoramas and magic lantern views of ice. Theatrical reconstructions of arctic expeditions. OCEAN: Selections from Melville's "Moby Dick," along with Rockwell Kent's illustrations for the 1930 edition. Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" alongside Gustave Doré's illustrations. Sirens. Poetry by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, and Walt Whitman. DESERT: Harry Burton's photos of King Tutankhamun's tomb. Edward Curtis' photograph of Canyon de Chelly. Richard Serra's sculptures in the Qatari desert. Ivan Aivazovsky's "Pyramid at Giza" painting. Selections from Cormac McCarthy's novel "Blood Meridian." Poems by Byron, Benjamin Alire Sáenz, and Robert Browning. MOUNTAIN: Hokusai's "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji" (including the famous "Great Wave" image). Frederic Church's paintings of volcanoes and mountains in South America. Ansel Adams and Carleton Watkins' views of Yosemite. Poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Emily Dickinson, and Marianne Moore. What do these landscapes accomplish for the writer or the artist? Why use them? What was going on at the historical moment these artworks were produced? Does that have any bearing on the use of these landscapes? Do these landscapes provide welcomed escapism or discomfort and terror? How do these works make us feel? Are we terrified? Curious? Excited? Adventurous? What role does discomfort play in literature and art? The Romantic period was dominated by an obsession with the notion of the "sublime"--something that terrifies yet delights, excites yet horrifies--a complex philosophical concept that we will wrap our heads around to understand the art and literature we examine. Given that at least two of these landscapes are under a very real threat in 2016, what happens when the vast expanses of ocean and the dangerous polar ice structures become endangered--when these once terrifying, vast landscapes are under threat of becoming diminished and frail? What happens to our notions of the Sublime? And what is at stake in looking at something that is fading away? Time permitting, we'll pick an extreme landscape (one we talked about, or another one of your choice that we didn't get a chance to mention) and begin thinking about how we would want to write about them or draw them (your choice!). How do we begin to describe or encapsulate something so big and vast? How can we look to some of the examples we've seen to help us puzzle through this dilemma?