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DEGREE REGULATIONS & PROGRAMMES OF STUDY 2021/2022

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DRPS : Course Catalogue : Edinburgh College of Art : Art

Undergraduate Course: Popular Art and Folk Culture (ARTX10045)

Course Outline
SchoolEdinburgh College of Art CollegeCollege of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Credit level (Normal year taken)SCQF Level 10 (Year 3 Undergraduate) AvailabilityAvailable to all students
SCQF Credits20 ECTS Credits10
SummaryFolk culture means the art and culture of ordinary people; the basis of popular art for millennia. This includes songs, tales, magical beliefs, jokes, metaphors; the visual culture of festivals, carnivals, rituals and rites of passage, the imagery of gender, dreams and nightmares; and characteristic ways of patterning and communicating these forms and concepts.

Course description Drawing on research into the history of carnivals and dreams, this course presents an alternative history of art and visual culture, illuminating the synergy between popular art and folk culture, from the cave art of 20,000 years ago to the present day.
Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
Pre-requisites Co-requisites
Prohibited Combinations Other requirements None
Information for Visiting Students
Pre-requisitesNone
High Demand Course? Yes
Course Delivery Information
Not being delivered
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
  1. Research: Research and show a critical understanding and autonomy in identifying of several principal methods of enquiry related to the practice and study of forms of popular and folk art.
  2. Analyse: Demonstrate a critical understanding of complex issues related to the analysis and production of folk culture and its relationship to contemporary art.
  3. Communicate: Successfully communicate your original research, analysis and professional initiative in a well structured, coherent and creative form.
Reading List
Barthes, Roland ,The Death of the Author, from his Image, Music, Text, 1977

Benjamin, Walter (1936), The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Bennett, Gillian, Bodies: Sex, Violence, Disease, and Death in Contemporary Legend, U of Mississippi: Lean Marketing Press 2005

Bloch, Maurice, and Jonathan Parry, eds., Death and the Regeneration of Life Cambridge, 1982, Introduction, 1-44

Butler, Judith. "Diane Arbus: Surface Tensions," Artforum international. 2004. 42(6)

Coutts-Smith, Kenneth, Cultural Colonialism(1978) reprinted in Third Text, 16 (1), 2002, pp. 1-14

Culler, Jonathan, Barthes: A Very Short Introduction, Ch. 6 & 7

Davis, Natalie Zemon, "Women On Top," in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press, 19750, Ch. 5, 124-151

A. Roger Ekirch, "Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-industrial Slumber in the British Isles," The American Historical Review April 2001

Foster, Hal, The Expressive Fallacy', Art in America (Jan. 1983), reprinted in his Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle, 1985), pp. 59-77- 123

Freeman, Norman H., 'Communication and representation: Why mentalistic reasoning is a lifelong endeavour,' in Children's reasoning and the mind, eds. Peter Mitchell & Kevin John Riggs (Hove: Psychology Press Ltd, 2000), Ch 17, 349-66

Frey, Rodney (2013), notes on Van Gennep's Rites of Passage

Guy Debord's 'The Society of the Spectacle' (1967)

Luhrmann, T. M., The Magic of Secrecy, Ethos (June 1989) 17(2):131-165

Mauss, Marcel, The Gift (1925)

Milne, Louise (2008), "Mermaids and Dreams In Visual Culture," Cosmos 22: 65-104

Milne, Louise, 'On the Side of Angels: Witness and Other Works', in Susan Hiller: Recall, ed. James Lingwood, (Gateshead: BALTIC, 2004): 141-9, 170-1

Ong, Walter J., African Talking Drums and Oral Noetics, New Literary History 8(3), (Spring, 1977) [Oral Cultures and Oral Performances] pp. 411-429; reprinted in his Interfaces of the Word

Piero di Cosimo's Carnival of Death

Vasari's account of Piero di Cosimo's Carnival of Death, from his Lives of the Artists

Russo, Mary. 'Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory,' Feminist Studies: Critical Studies. ed. Teresa De Lauretis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985

Scribner. R. W., 'Reformation, Carnival and the World Turned Upside Down', Social History, 3(3), 1978: 303-329; reprinted in his Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London, Hambleton, 1987), 71-101

Turner, Victor, Betwixt and Between The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage (1964)

Turner, Victor, The Ritual Process. Structure and Anti-Structure (Aldine De Gruyter, New York, 1969) 96- 130

Warner, Marina, From the Beast to the Blonde, Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (Vintage: London, 1995), Ch2-4 (Old Wives' Tales), 12-66

Williams, Raymond, Culture is Ordinary (1958)

Zumthor, Paul, and Jean McGarry, The Impossible Closure of the Oral Text, Yale French Studies 67, Concepts of Closure (1984), pp. 25-42

Zumthor, Paul, Oral Poetry: An Introduction Ch 1

Additional Information
Graduate Attributes and Skills Research methods, self motivated practice, collaboration, negotiation, critical evaluation.
KeywordsVisual culture,critical evaluation,presentation,research.
Contacts
Course organiserDr Louise Milne
Tel:
Email: louise.milne@ed.ac.uk
Course secretaryDr Eadaoin Lynch
Tel: (0131 6)51 5735
Email: eadaoin.lynch@ed.ac.uk
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