U.C. Berkeley History of Art

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COURSES FALL 2007

R1B

READING AND WRITING ABOUT VISUAL EXPERIENCE (4 units)

Section 1 TuTh 8:00-9:30 425 Doe CCN: 05403 Intructor: Kris Seaman	Section 2 TuTh 9:30-11:00 425 Doe CCN: 05406 Intructor: Kris Paulsen	Section 3 TuTh 11:00-12:30 104 Moffit CCN: 05409 Intructor: Benjamin Young
Section 4 TuTh 12:30-2:00 104 Moffit CCN: 05412 Intructor: Becky Martin	Section 5 TuTh 3:00-4:30 425 Doe CCN:05415 Intructor: Anthony Grudin	Section 6 TuTh 3:30-5:00 104 Moffit CCN: 05418 Intructor: Francis Chung
Section 7 TuTh 5:00-6:30 104 Moffit CCN: 05421 Intructor: Joanna Cyganik	Section 8 MW 4:00-5:30 CANCELLED

One objective of this course is to introduce students to the historical study and interpretation of art. If you have already taken a course in the History of Art, you should enroll in an R1B course in another department or in a more advanced course in the History of Art.

This course is an introduction to visuality and the disciplines of art history. Its primary aim is to guide students through the processes of learning to recognize and craft persuasive and elegant arguments about visual experience. We will anchor our inquiry of vision and perception, and our efforts to develop our capacity for interpretation, by focusing on the work of selected artists. We will also expand our inquiry beyond the fine arts, testing the applicability of our perceptual and analytic skills on other kinds of visual phenomena, including film, architecture, and advertising. To begin, we will familiarize ourselves with fundamental concepts and tools for reading and writing about visual experience. These include questions of material and form; models of attention and perception, the relationship between language and vision; the role of description in interpretation; and what constitutes a satisfying and complete account of visual experience. Throughout the semester we will analyze and improve our writing abilities as we move from basic compositional skills to the construction of a compelling and effective argument. Our work will be practical in nature, and a good portion of our class time will be spent talking in small groups and working on in-class writing exercises. At the end of the term, students will write a 7-9 page paper about a single artist or work of art. Reading will figure in this course as significantly as writing. We will devote much of our home preparation and class time to the discussion of short essays, analyzing them both for their rhetorical strategies and for the lessons they have to teach us about our own writing. Students should expect to submit their prose to the same kinds of analysis that will be applied to the work of published authors, counting themselves members of the wider community of writers.

This class satisfies the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement.