In the NEH's 1988 report on Humanities in America, one section on "The Scholar and Society" received an enormous amount of attention and fueled the conservative attacks on academics interested in contemporary culture and the political economies of literature and mass media. Another section of the report has received less attention; it was greeted with little controversy. The section entitled "Word and Image," noted that the average American watches approximately seven hours of TV each day. It also argued that TV adaptations of great literature offer a useful way to share the humanities with a larger audience. This section's assumption that contemporary culture had to accept the pervasiveness of the image was greeted with little fanfare or controversy.

It is a common assumption that contemporary culture is inundated with images, but what precisely is an image?

This course seeks to examine contemporary definitions of images especially in relation to words. It also will study the history, development, and criticisms of the culture of images (or what Hillel Schwartz calls the "culture of the copy").

In studying words, images, and culture, the course will examine current trends in film and visual theories especially where they overlap with literary and textual studies.

Readings will include the following (tentative list open to additions):

When Depth Takes a Holiday Sandra Loh Picture Theory WJT Mitchell Downcast Eyes Martin Jay The Culture of the Copy Hillel Schwartz Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media Marjorie Perloff Image and Text Meyer Shapiro Image/Music/Text R. Barthes The Phantom Empire Geoffrey O'Brien Mr. Wilson's Magic Cabinet Weschler