The critic W.J.T. Mitchell once noted that “a verbal representation cannot represent—that is, make present—its object in the same way a visual representation can. It may refer to an object, describe it, invoke it, but it can never bring its visual presence before us in the way pictures do. Words can ‘cite,’ but never ‘sight’ their objects.” At the heart of this assertion is the assumption that showing and telling function in two fundamentally different ways and that showing is somehow more immediate than telling, more capable of conveying meaning. Yet language and images do not exist isolated from one another. Rather, they share common culturally constructed conventions of narration that converge and, at times, diverge in significant ways. The way we show and the way we tell are more similar than might first appear. This class begins from the simple question: what is the interplay between language and image and what does their interaction tell us about narrative in a visual age? How do we construct narratives in a world awash in images?

The class will be organized into four interrelated units: Learning to See/ Learning to Tell; Intermedial Texts; Adaptation; and a New Way of Seeing. We will begin with a brief history of vision in the Western world and trace the evolution of the concept of vision from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century and the advent of mechanical capture. The first unit will juxtapose the explosion of visual technologies in the nineteenth century with the development of realism and its rise to dominance as the narrative form par excellence in the same century. The second unit will focus on two intermedial texts and ask if and how the linguistic and pictorial coexist and amplify one another. The third unit will examine questions of adaptation. For instance, how do two ways of telling approach the same narrative structure? What are the limitations and strengths of each? The final unit will address how the digital age is impacting our assumptions and experience of reality and whether new technologies are creating new ways of telling.

This course is interdisciplinary and will draw its readings from a variety of fields: history of science and technology, literary criticism, art history, geography, criticism and theory, film studies, and literature. Authors will include Barthes, Debord, Crary, Agee and Evans, Conrad and John Berger among others.