UCL - Contemporary literature and images

[ROM2750]

[15h] 5 credits

This course is taught in the 2d semester.

This two-yearly course is taught in 2010-2011, 2012-2013,...

Teacher(s): Jean-Louis Tilleuil

Language: French

Level: Second

Aims
Main themes
Content and teaching methods

Aims

During the 20th century, written culture has been more and more associated with visual culture, whether in popular literary works (illustrated books for children, comic books, newspapers or magazines, advertisement, video clips, etc.) or in "high" literature (illustration, graphic and typographic visualisation, etc.). The main goal of this course is to give to the students, who are bound to meet this mixing of languages (text+image) in their research or their professional life, a rigorous theoretical and methodological frame which makes possible the analysis of contemporary images and of their frequent interactions with various literary texts, popular or not.

Main themes

Critical explanation of the ideological issues in which the distinct stands on the text and the image have their roots.
Exploitation of the contributions of particular semiologies (verbal and visual).
Presentation and testing of the main relational models to analyse works mixing text and image.
Exercises in applied semiology (advertisement, comic books, illustrated press, etc.).

Content and teaching methods

The course is based on a preliminary analysis of the historico-sociological issues which go with any study of the image and the relationships image-text, as well as an epistemological reflection on the problematic meeting between scriptural meta-language and visual objects (iconic, plastic) which are the subjects of this study. A critical synthesis of the main theories about the study of the relationship image-text (or about the study of one of these two modes, as far as this study can contribute to the final theoretical development) will be given to the students; it leads to the perfecting of methodological tools likely to be used to analyse the (popular) literary text and contemporary images.
The locating, interpretation and confrontation of cultural, ideological and symbolic contents promoted by the textual and iconico-plastic forms will also be given special emphasis.
Lectures, during which theoretical talks will be illustrated with the analysis of works associating image and text.