11110256 - Anglais littérature 5 - Master 2 LCE

Verbal and Visual Representation in Britain : From the Birth of Photography to Contemporary Art.

This course will give an opportunity to investigate and explain current models for understanding art, focusing on examples taken from British art from the nineteenth century on (literature, architecture, sculpture, painting, photography and decorative arts). Students will be invited to explore particular moments of cross-fertilisation between science and culture, both in literature and visual media; they will be introduced to the revolution that occurred with the invention of photography in the 1840s, soon followed by the birth of moving images and the cinema. The conceptual implications of these new means of representation, and the questions they provoked are still at the heart of contemporary arts, as will be documented in this course.

The course will be helpful for students who wish to prepare for the Agrégation, as they will work on sets of documents (literature, history of ideas, visual arts) in order to elaborate a synthesis of them all, an exercise inspired by the same rules that apply for the oral part of the concours. This seminar thus also serves as a preparation for the E.H.P. (Epreuve Hors-Programme), dealing both with content (aesthetics) and form (methodology).

Selected Bibliography:

• DIDI-HUBERMAN, Georges. L'empreinte. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997
• GOMBRICH, Ernst H. Art and Illusion. A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1977.
• MITCHELL, W. J. T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 1986.
• SONTAG, Susan. On Photography. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.
• SOULAGES, François. Esthétique de la photographie : la perte et le reste. Paris : Nathan, 1998.
• STOICHITA, Victor I. L'instauration du Tableau. Genève: Droz, 1999.
• WUNENBURGER, Jean-Jacques. Philosophie des images. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997.

Examen terminal écrit 4 h