MONASH UNIVERSITY FACULTY HANDBOOKS

Arts Undergraduate Handbook 1996

Authorised by Academic Registrar, April 1996

CLS4270

Cultural theory and visuality

Proposed to be offered next in 1997

Synopsis This subject addresses the relation between cultural and critical theory and the visual field. The range of visual products whose theorisation will be considered includes photography and film, painting, sculpture, architecture, performance, non-Western visual practices, and common objects. Discussion will take place on the historical positions and the theoretical construction of these products with reference to the discourses of modernism and modernity, postmodernism, the body, totalitarianism/post-totalitarianism, museology and institutions, and `the everyday'.

Preliminary reading

• Barasch M Theories of art from Plato to Wincklemann New York U P, 1985
• Barthes R The responsibility of forms: Critical essays on music, art and representation Hill and Wang, 1985
• Bryson N Vision and painting: The logic of the gaze Macmillan, 1983
• Bryson N (ed.) Calligram: Essays in the new art history from France CUP, 1988
• Clark T J The absolute bourgeois: Artists and politics in France 1848-1851 Thames and Hudson, 1973
• Gombrich E H Art and illusion: A study in the psychology of pictorial representation Phaidon, 1977
• Michelson A and others (eds) October: The first decade MIT, 1988
• Preziosi D Rethinking art history: Meditations on a coy science Yale U P, 1989
• Rees A L and Borzello F (eds) The new art history Camden, 1986