This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
This module examines a selection of pre-eminent texts in modern French art theory and philosophy. It invites students to analyse and to chart intersections and developments in French writing on the image across shifting critical landscapes, including those marked by phenomenology, structuralism and post-structuralism. Students will be encouraged to explore French theories of art with due attention to historical precedents, and to reflect on the aesthetic, political and technological significance of the visual arts for a wide range of French thinkers.
The course will be taught in English. Relevant texts may be studied in English translation, but students with proficiency in European languages are encouraged to read texts in the original language.
Total contact hours: 20
Essay (5000 words) - 100%
Barthes, Roland, (1993). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. London: Vintage Classics;
Deleuze, Gilles, (2017). Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. London and New York: Bloomsbury;
Derrida, Jacques, (2010). Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press;
Didi-Huberman, Georges, (2009). Confronting the Image. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press;
Foucault, Michel, (2008). This is Not a Pipe. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press;
Rancière, Jacques, (2009). The Future of the Image. London and New York: Verso Books;
Sartre, Jean-Paul, (1940). The Imaginary. London: Routledge
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
Students will be able to engage critically with a variety of approaches to the visual arts in modern French art theory and philosophy;
Students will be able to comprehensively explore French theories of art paying due attention to their conceptual affinities and historical precedents;
Students will be able to demonstrate broad appreciation of the similarities and differences between phenomenological, structuralist and post-structuralist engagements with the visual arts;
Students will be able to comprehensively explore the ways in which the visual arts and philosophy intersect;
Students will be able to demonstrate the ability to carry out detailed analysis of theoretical and philosophical works that take the visual arts as their focus.
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