Postgraduate Course: Art in Theory (HIAR11090)
Course Outline
| School | Edinburgh College of Art |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course will familiarise students with key developments in art theory since c. 1960, focusing on enabling students to apply theoretical approaches to the analysis of artworks. |
| Course description |
Since the advent of postmodernism in the late 1960s, theories of art have offered significant interventions into how we see, sense, and critically engage with art and the objects, experiences, and worlds it represents, as well as influencing our understanding of how art is produced and disseminated. This course will explore a selection of theoretical considerations published since c1960 of the artwork and its effects and affects in diverse media. Some of the key intellectual currents explored will include structuralist and poststructuralist theories, varieties of postmodernism, identity politics and aesthetics, psychoanalytic theories, ideological theories, competing histories of art, debates over issues of originality and authenticity, functions of art in globalised and new imperial contexts, trauma aesthetics, and art theory within eco-critical and deep-time-historical theoretical debates.
This course will equip students with some of the advanced analytical and methodological tools that inform contemporary aesthetic inquiry, reflecting some of the diverse modes of theoretical engagement with questions of the aesthetic and of the artwork. The course will be structured around close readings of key texts, and the application of theoretical analysis to relevant artworks.
Study pattern:
Students will receive a two-hour introductory lecture and ten two-hour seminars, made up of an introduction
by the seminar tutor and illustrated student presentations (15 minutes) and group discussion. At the end of each preceding seminar, the tutor will introduce next week¿s session and highlight some key questions for consideration in advance and in relation to the set reading. Presentations and discussions will engage with close analyses of the weekly text focused on, by using visual material of students choice.
Self-directed learning comprises:
Seminar preparation: 57 hours
Presentation preparation: 60 hours
Essay research and writing: 60 hours
Indicative list of topics and reading:
1. Introduction: Jacques Rancière The Future of the Image (2007)
2. Representation: Roland Barthes / Jean Baudrillard
3. Originality: Giorgio Agamben / Rosalind Krauss
4. The Frame: Jacques Derrida / Sarah Kofman
5. Trauma: Marianne Hirsch / Jay Prosser
6. Psychoanalysis: Julia Kristeva / Slavoj Zizek
7. Aesthetics / Perception: Jean-Luc Nancy / Jean-Francois Lyotard
8. Synaesthesis: Gilles Deleuze / Laura Marks
9. Performativities: Judith Butler / Amelia Jones
10. Globalization: Noel Carroll / Gayatri Spivak
11. Ecocriticism: selections from Braddock & Irmscher.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
| Additional Costs | 0 |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | 0 |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Understand key topics in recent and late-20th Century art theoretical debates.
- Evaluate interconnections and distinctions between different positions within art theoretical traditions and debates.
- Critique art theoretical concepts and arguments when applied in the analysis of artworks.
- Present independent research and analysis in a variety of media.
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Reading List
Indicative Primary Reading (provisional and subject to change at short notice)
Agamben, G. 'The Original Structure of the Work of Art', in The Man Without Content (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 58-72.
Barthes, R. 'Rhetoric of the Image', in Image, Music, Text (London: Fontana Press, 1977), pp. 32-51.
Baudrillard, J. Simulacra and Simulations (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994).
Braddock, A. & Irmscher, C. (eds.) A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 2009).
Butler, J. 'The Force of Fantasy: Feminism, Mapplethorpe, and Discursive Excess', differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. Vol. 2, No. 2, Summer 1990, 105-125.
Carroll, N. 'Art and Globalisation: Then and Now', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Vol. 65 No. 1 Winter 2007, 131-143.
Deleuze, G. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (London and New York: Continuum, 2003).
Derrida, J. 'Parergon' [1978], in The Truth in Painting (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 37-82.
Hirsch, M. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Post-Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Jones, A. Body Art / Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
Kofman, S. 'The Truth in Painting' ('The Melancholy of Art', 'The Resemblance of Portraits', 'Conjuring Death'), in Thomas Albrecht, Georgia Albert and Elizabeth G. Rottenberg (eds.), Selected Writings (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 205-44.
Krauss, R., The Originality of the Avant-Garde and other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986).
Kristeva, J. The Severed Head: Capital Visions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
Lyotard, J-F. 'Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?', appendix to The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 71-84.
Marks, L. 'The Logic of Smell', Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 113-26.
Nancy, J-L. 'Distinct Oscillation' [2003], The Ground of the Image (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 63-79.
Prosser, J. Light in the Dark Room: Photography and Loss (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
Rancière, J. The Future of the Image (London and New York: Verso, 2007).
Spivak, G. 'Sign and Trace', in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalisation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).
Zizek, S. The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: A David Lynch's Lost Highway (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000).
Indicative Secondary Reading
Bacci, Francesca and David Melcher, Art and the Senses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Bogue, Ronald Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts (Abingdon, OX and New York: Routledge 2003).
Chanter, Tina and Pleshett DeArmitt (eds.), Sarah Kofman¿s Corpus, (New York: State University of New York Press, 2008
Davis, Oliver Jacques Rancière (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010).
de la Durantaye, Leland 'Art for Art's Sake: The Destruction of Aesthetics and The Man Without Content', in Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 26-55.
Gane, Mike (ed.) Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).
Heathfield, Adrian and Amelia Jones Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2012).
Lane, Richard J. Jean Baudrillard (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2009).
Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.), Writing the Image After Roland Barthes (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).
Royle, Nicholas, Jacques Derrida (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2003).
van Tuinen, Sjoerd and Niamh McDonnell (ed.) Deleuze and the Fold: A Critical Reader (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Visual and critical analysis
Independent research skills (locate, access, and interpret information)
Presentation and communication skills (oral and written)
Organisation and planning
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| Special Arrangements |
None. |
| Study Abroad |
0 |
| Keywords | Art theory, rhetoric, aesthetics, representation |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Patricia Allmer
Tel: (0131 6)51 3113
Email: Patricia.Allmer@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Lizzie Robertson
Tel: (0131 6)50 3079
Email: lizzie.robertson@ed.ac.uk |
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