ENGL3332 Literature and Art

Course Description

The study of art within the context of British Literature, American Literature, or Comparative Literature with special emphasis on gender constructs.

This course explores the interrelationship of literature and the visual arts represented in Victorian and modern novels and teaches you new ways of seeing rather than merely reading literature. Simultaneously, it trains you to appreciate the enchantment of visual arts through the ages. We study the works of notable literary artists who interwove literature and art in such graceful and enchanting ways as to make readers aware that quite often one art could not be fully understood or appreciated without the other.

In this course you will discover the means through which, in the process of seeking narrative reconfigurations of paintings in literary works, you are drawn into the literary artist’s magic circle of creation and contribute to the construction of literary texts. Such reconfigurations, however, do not merely involve aesthetic principles but are often based on historical and theoretical grounds. This course teaches you the complexity of such grounds and shows you the means by which you can appreciate the technical and ideological aspects of notable paintings by Jan Vermeer, Michelangelo, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, and notable Pre-Raphaelite painters, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Marie Stillman, Edward Burne-Jones, and John Waterhouse. 

Course Credits: 3

Prerequisites: ENGL1301 and ENGL1302.

Student Learning Outcomes

By completing this course, students will be able to demonstrate the following:

  1. Write interdisciplinary assignments showing the connections between literature and art.
  2. Identify narrative reconfigurations of major Pre-Raphaelite and impressionistic paintings in fiction.
  3. Identify characteristics of Pre-Raphaelite and impressionistic art.
  4. Recognize the impact of the visual arts on our own perspectives on gender.
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