Self-Designed Major Proposal (THE FINAL DRAFT EVER!)

Thank you all for your comments and help! I've tried to incorporate what I could, but I've also significantly re-structured my proposal as a whole. Clara pointed out that I was framing it as a double major and then arguing as to why it was really something else and that it might be more effective if I framed it as something else. So this is the new form my proposal has taken (and the final form). It's what I'm showing to professors, getting signatures for, etc. And I'm really excited about it! (The course list is still the same, so I haven't posted it again here.)

Because I want it to be done, because I have shown this to some professors already, I'd rather not get suggested changes for this form (unless they're small grammatical or spelling errors that obviously need to be fixed). I'm just going to go with it and turn it in and cross my fingers!!

Anyway, here it is. Hopefully I'll soon be working on an official major in "Art and Literature as Cultural Texts!"

Proposal for an IDIM in "Art and Literature as Cultural Texts"

Our current understanding of divisions among disciplines is fast becoming an artificial one, particularly between the various subjects of humanities and artistic studies. The ideas of cultural theorists like Marx and Freud and their followers—used by many of these disciplines—barely acknowledge that these divisions are even present, especially with regards to the separation of visual art and literature. For these theorists, all artistic productions, visual or verbal, should be studied as elements of the same cultural moment. To use these theoretical frameworks in one field—literary studies, for example—without acknowledging the other artistic productions of the same cultural moment is to lose some of their strength. The artificiality of this disciplinary separation becomes particularly clear when inspecting the academic fields of Art History, English, and Theater Studies.

Not only do the theoretical frameworks of each field demand a more integrated study, but the artistic productions themselves demand it as well. The producers of artistic works have traditionally been in communication with each other (or have been one and the same person). The stylistic progressions of visual and verbal artistic productions throughout history are therefore inextricably linked: William Blake’s poetry cannot be studied without his accompanying artworks; Giorgio Vasari’s historical fiction on the lives of the artists is crucial to the study of Renaissance art; Rainer Maria Rilke’s artistic thought was influenced by Paul Cezanne’s paintings—the list goes on and on. Art history and literature are not parts of separate academic fields, but rather elements of linked creative movements.

           

Many of these works are even more directly linked. The text of most plays is claimed by literature studies and the performance by those interested in the arts, with the result that Theater, Art, and English departments all study both the texts and performances of plays. Less abstractly, any work that combines text and artworks—graphic novels, illuminated manuscripts, children’s books, much of our everyday visual culture, etc.—necessarily requires the study of both. Other works make overt references to previous artistic productions in other forms. For example, Pieter Brueghel’s The Fall of Icarus was inspired by the Greek myth of Daedalus and Icarus and went on to inspire W. H. Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” and William Carlos Williams’ “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”. In cases like these, it is insufficient to read the poem by itself—one must also study the painting that came before it (and the myth before that).

Various academic institutions are beginning to attempt to rectify the problems created by these artificial academic divides. A range of universities in the United Kingdom (including East Anglia, Buckingham, and Oxford) now offer both undergraduate and graduate programs allowing for concurrent study of these fields. At other universities, scholars are beginning to question the way their fields choose which works to study. As Robert Scholes, in a book about the future of English education, writes, “ […] we must stop ‘teaching literature’ and start ‘studying texts.’ […] Our favorite works of literature need not be lost in this new enterprise, but the exclusivity of literature as a category must be discarded. All kinds of texts, visual as well as verbal, polemic as well as seductive, must be taken as the occasions for further textuality”(16, emphasis added). The same could be said for studies of the history of art.

My proposal is for a major that would hope to solve some of the problems created by this disciplinary divide, a major that would allow for the study of these separate academic fields as the inherently connected cultural productions that they are. The philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin writes:

Every literary phenomenon, like every other ideological phenomenon, is simultaneously determined from without (extrinsically) and from within (intrinsically). From within it is determined by literature itself, and from without by other spheres of social life. […] The truly scholar study of literary history can only be built on the basis of this dialectical conception of the individuality and interaction of the various ideological phenomena.(Medvedev and Bakhtin 134).

Traditional studies allow for (and encourage) the study of the intrinsic influences on a particular work of literature—what other works came before it and how they could have influenced its form. They do not allow, however, for a full study of the extrinsic influences on any particular work. Though we may study the economic or political atmosphere of the cultural moment, we do not study the other artistic forms that are being produced in the same moment. If important works in the medium of sculpture can have an effect on the painted productions of the time, then why would we assume that verbal productions could not have the same effect?

It has been suggested that I double major in Art History and English in order to achieve this goal. Although it would be possible to do so, such a decision would merely reinforce the divide between art and literature and make it difficult to study the interactions between the various cultural productions. Besides this rather philosophical reason, the logistics of double majoring (especially with study abroad) would limit the classes I could choose. Instead of always attempting to pick classes that would best study this intersection, I would need to choose based on the requirements of each individual major. Classes like “Shakespeare Studies”, “Twentieth Century British Poetry”, or “Baroque Art” might fall by the wayside, despite the contributions they could make to this particular area of study.

Additionally, the requirements of each major’s capstone would demand specificity of topic and would not allow for a project exploring the meeting place of these two fields.  Each major (as a whole) attempts to teach its texts separately from those belonging to the other field. But 18^th Century philosophical discussions of personhood can give insight into the visual productions of the twenty-first century abortion debate and any study of the literary works of the Harlem Renaissance would be incomplete without acknowledging the visual productions of the time. Furthermore, a self-designed major allows some classes in other relevant fields to be included. Classes like “Greek Myths” and “Texts and Power” allow for further study of both forms of texts, but would be impossible to include in the double major format.

Media and Cultural Studies has also been suggested as a way of achieving this goal, but while this field has much to offer with regards to the extrinsic influences (using Bakhtin’s definitions) on cultural productions, it has none of the emphasis on the intrinsic that classes in literary studies or art history demand. Nor does it have the same focus on the canonical works of art history and literature—it focuses more on other kinds of cultural productions like films, advertisements, etc.

As my current educational plans include a continued study of visual and verbal artistic cultural productions in graduate school—at one of the programs mentioned above or an interdisciplinary program in either field—allowing for this focus early on could be extremely beneficial. My proposed major and class list is therefore an attempt to study various kinds of artistic texts not only as they have been studied, but as they should be studied: as texts that are intrinsically in dialogue with each other and with other fields of study.