Departments
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Week of 7 November 1997 |
Vol. I, No. 11 |
Feature
Article
Sister Arts course at UNI to link muses
"An ardent conversation on the competing claims of poetry and the visual arts" may be one way to describe an unusual course that Bruce Redford plans to teach when he joins The University Professors and the CAS English faculties in January. That, at any rate, is his description of the subject Leonardo da Vinci elucidated in Paragone (Comparison), a book that Redford calls both a model for the interdisciplinary Sister Arts course he will offer this spring and an example of a prominent Renaissance literary genre that the class will consider. The course will be open to graduate students of both literature and art history and to advanced undergraduates.
"Seeing and saying," Redford says, "are linked activities that have preoccupied Western culture ever since Horace brought literature and painting into alignment with his comparison ut pictura poesis [creating poetry is like painting], and the new course will proceed chronologically and topically through the sister arts. Besides the Paragone, attention will be given to the ecphrasis, or literary description, of a work of art, such as Homer's depiction of the shield of Achilles in The Iliad or Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn,' to the connection between biography and portraiture, and to cubism, with its representations of objects from multiple viewpoints."
Some questions the class will consider are how one can fruitfully interpret printed texts as opposed to visual images and which should have primacy. "People nowadays are used to getting more information from images than from reading," Redford says, "but we'll consider these two media historically and theoretically and see what conclusions can be drawn."
While Redford will direct the course and serve as its principal teacher, several BU professors will give classes on their specialties, including Rosanna Warren of UNI, George Hoffmann of the CAS modern foreign languages and literatures department, and Hellmut Wohl of the CAS art history department. Ingrid Rowland of the University of Chicago will also contribute.
Since earning a doctorate at Princeton in 1986, Redford has taught at the University of Chi-cago. He is the author or editor of six books or series, including the five-volume Hyde Edition of The Letters of Samuel Johnson (Princeton University Press and Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992-94).
For more information on the Sister Arts course, call Susan Tomassetti at The University Professors at 353-4020.