Course Description
How do you read images with(in) books? Can images persuade, seduce, or even lead the narrative astray? Drawing from the works on text and image from Visual Culture scholars, this interdisciplinary course focuses on visual textuality—the ‘book’ as a visible object of cultural consumption and production in the West and Mediterranean. This class reinforces the fact that the visual textuality of Visual Studies entails a complex study of the book and its ‘images’. Students will consider how the ‘text and image’ relationship alter and influence different acts of reading. In addition, students will undertake the task of understanding and analyzing this multifaceted art form by examining illuminated manuscripts, illustrated texts, and graphic narratives.
Achilles’ shield is an impossible object, which makes the ekphrastic process attached to it all the more crucial. It carries not only the narrative of Greek history but the mythologization of that history as well, as the inclusion of figures such as Ares and Athena demonstrates. Yet the shield itself is embedded in that complex interweaving of myth and history mythology, albeit on a meta-level. It carries the story of which it is part. Readers understand that the position the shield occupies makes it an impossible object moreso than the complex physicality. Thus what is left to the reader is a description of depiction, a series of words, a chunk of text that serves as the ‘voice’ of an object that has no physical being beyond its mythical role. As it carries the history of Greece, the shield is meant to be understood as a physical object, but at the same time, as a figure with a role within the meta-myth, the shield is obviously composed of words on a page and not of carved metal.
Ekphrasically, then, the section of text devoted to Achilles’ shield is both descriptive and depictive, and it is difficult to say whether one or the other takes dominance. In a sense, there is nothing to depict; the shield is fictional, a construct. Supposedly a physical object is being described, but in the absence of that object, the words must be equal to the weight of the shield. This would be a typical ekphrastic approach. However, the object cannot truly be said to be absent from the description because the description comprised the object in the first place. What we are left with is an object that is both physically impossible and physically necessary on different textual levels and thus can perhaps only be a textual object, practically speaking. And yet the scenes attributed to the shield are so complex that we might also require the aid of an illustration to understand what is being described- thus the shield is given a kind of second-order physicality. Achilles’ shield thus traverses the narrative and the illustrative, the textual and the visual, in a way that requires readers to recognize the overlap between these categories.