This course is for students ready to translate texts into images and objects and vice versa. We will examine the exemplary works of artists who have done this as well as the work of the scholars who study them. We will study Emily Dickinson’s envelope sculpture/poems and hand-sewn “fascicles,” while reading Adrienne Rich’s work on the impact of this hand-made poetry and poetics. We will study theorists, such as Richard Chalfen, Pierre Bourdieu, and Roland Barthes, who have focused on the emergence of the ritual of taking family snapshots as well as authors who have used the frame of the family album as points of departure for their auto-fiction, writers such as Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux. Students will be asked to do both analytical writing and creative work.

This course is for students ready to translate texts into images and objects and vice versa. We will examine the exemplary works of artists who have done this as well as the work of the scholars who study them. We will study Emily Dickinson’s envelope sculpture/poems and hand-sewn “fascicles,” while reading Adrienne Rich’s work on the impact of this hand-made poetry and poetics. We will study theorists, such as Richard Chalfen, Pierre Bourdieu, and Roland Barthes, who have focused on the emergence of the ritual of taking family snapshots as well as authors who have used the frame of the family album as points of departure for their auto-fiction, writers such as Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux. Students will be asked to do both analytical writing and creative work.