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The Three Art Papers: Handout

In case you lose it, or just want to see it conveniently on the blog, here is the assignment sheet for the Three Art Papers. Read it carefully and let me know if you have any questions about due dates (they're all on the syllabus). Also, I'll be posting links and images to artists throughout the semester to help you, so keep checking the blog! 

THE THREE ART PAPERS

 INTRO: For each book we read, I’ll begin our discussion with an examination of a pivotal artist whose works I feel are in dialogue with the book in question. We will always do an in-class writing to get us thinking about the work, and then we’ll continue to use the artists’ work and ideas as a frame for our class discussions. Ideally, this will help you see the many of the themes of the novel visually, which will also remind you that different forms of art aren’t created in a vacuum. Writers are looking at paintings and listening to music and living in a world that continually inspires them. It quickly becomes a ‘chicken or the egg’ situation: who dreamed it up first? Who was the true inspiration?

PROMPT: To help you explore the connections between literature and art, I want you to write THREE “Art and Literature” readings, based on ANY THREE of the novels in class. To do this, I want you to use a work from the artist we discuss in class to examine a specific passage in the book. This paper should be short, around 2-4 pages long double-spaced, and should use the artwork as a lens to ‘read’ some of the ideas/characters/themes of the book. But be specific: focus on only a specific scene or aspect of the novel, and QUOTE from it so we can see the literal connections from image to text. You DO NOT have to make it literal: that is, if you’re doing Goya’s Third of May, 1808, you don’t have to find a corresponding moment in the novel with a firing squad. Think more figuratively, and consider how the ideas and images of the painting complement similar passages in the novel.

SCHEDULE: You CHOOSE which of the three Art and Literature papers you want to do, since you have SIX choices. Each one is due NO LATER than the day we start discussing a new work of art. The deadlines for each paper are in the syllabus calendar.

BUT REMEMBER that if you skip the first three, you MUST do the last three to get three assignments turned in! Otherwise, you’ll lose points, and each assignment is worth 15 points out of 100. So be careful! You can also revise these assignments for a higher grade if you slightly miss the point. Keep your in-class writings so you can use them again in the paper for ideas/inspiration.

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