HUM 332 Visual Culture  Tags: art_history european_art visual_culture  

While some of the resources in this guide are freely available, most research databases and electronic journals and many online library services have access restrictions that require that you be a current Washington University student, faculty member, or staff member. See this page for help.

This is the library research guide for Professor Cathleen Fleck's course Visual Culture, Humanities 332.

Please let Kasia Leousis know if you have any questions about the guide, WU Library services, or research in art history.

Contemporary culture is often understood as one privileging sight over other modes of perception. We live, it is said, in a society of images and all-encompassing spectacles. But the history of how images mediate what and how we see is of course much longer than our own present. In this interdisciplinary course, we explore this long history of vision and visual representation from antiquity to the present so as to shed light on how people at different moments have understood vision, have seen their own seeing and have encoded this seeing in different artifacts and media. More specifically, we explore the role of the visual in the historical production of subjectivity and collectivity; the political, religious, and ideological uses and abuses of vision; the relation of images to words and stories; the implication of sight in competing systems of truth, enlightenment, and scientific progress; and the function of seeing within different media of art, entertainment, and virtualization-from ancient cave painting, medieval icons and early modern church designs to modernist paintings and motion pictures.