Course Description
The course introduces the concept of visual culture. It is an academic field of study that is interdisciplinary and generally includes aspects of cultural studies, art history, critical theory, philosophy, the sociology of knowledge, visual sociology, visual anthropology, visual communication, and cognitive linguistics. In all of these disciplines, there are aspects of culture that rely on visual images. Hence, they constitute the study of visual culture. This area of study is important because with the advent of television and other forms of visual technology, there has been a shift from print to visual culture. The older methodologies associated with print culture such as the cartesian space based on contrasts of syntagmatic arrangments and paradigmatic substitutions and contrasts are not adequate in accounting for the cognitive arrangement of visual space. A different form of visual syntax and visual morphology is needed to explain how visual space is organized.
Some of the recurring topics in the study of visual culture is the idea of the unconscious gaze that was developed by Jacques Lacan, the role of the embodied mind in processing visual informaton (Merleau-Ponty), the concepts of frame theory and visual metaphor from cognitive linguistics, the role of visual exemplars in prototype theory, the profiling of visual morphology against a background of organized knowledge, the role of visual metonymy in the interpretation of visual events, and the implications of the predominance of visual forms of media, communication, and information in the postmodern world. The experience of culturally meaningful visual content appears in multiple forms, and visual content and codes used in one visual platform often migrates another. Consequently, illustrations of visual culture may include print images, graphic design, television, film and viseo, ditigal multimedia, advertising, fine art, photograph, fasion, architecture and urban design.
The course includes two textbooks. The instructor will lecture in the first half of the course and the second part of the course is a student-driven seminar on various topics in the visual culture reader. The grades are based on classroom performance, interaction, and on a required final paper.
The Instructor reserves the right to make changes to the syllabus when necessary to meet learning objectives, compensate for missed classes, or for similar reasons.