107-017 Visual Cultures

This subject encompasses a study of popular forms of a variety of visual cultures including the cinema, television, art, photography, design, advertising and multimedia. The origins of some of these visual forms (for example, photography, television and the cinema) will be accounted for, but the course will especially concern itself with a focus on the various critical and interpretative methods which have dominated the analysis of visual cultures in the 20th century. These may include questions of realism, avant-gardism and alternative approaches to mainstream forms, propaganda and ideology, issues of nationalism. Other broader issues to be raised will centre around visual cultures and their relationship with commodification, spectatorship, ideology, form and style, fantasy and desire, authorship and sexuality.