Studies in the Relations Between Literature and the Other Arts

What is realism? How have ideas of realism changed over time and across media, from photography and documentary—where the idea of the “document” takes multiple forms—to avant-garde/modernist poetry, novels and experimental films? This course explores the fraught nexus of questions of realism and media, with special attention to how these inflect problems of  gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity. Examples will be drawn from a wide range of texts: early 20th century modernism/avant-gardes, realist/reportage photography, 1960s-70s landscape theory and protest cinema, postwar fiction, all the way up to new media/digital art. Because of the specialization of the instructor, many (but not all) case studies will be drawn from Japanese culture, and will be paired with recent theoretical works in the field and visits by artists and emergent scholars, as well as classic “canonical” texts.