ENGLISH 29Q: Writing About Art

Course Description

In this course we'll practice ekphrastic writing, or writing about art. Taking advantage of campus resources, such as the Rodin Sculpture Garden, the Cantor Art Museum and the Anderson Collection, as well as field trips to Bay Area art museums, we'll explore how the act of writing about art can help us be more present in encounters with artworks. By writing in the presence of a painting or a sculpture or a building, we aren't merely writing about art, but writing with it, investing our writing with the same qualities we admire in whatever object we're regarding. We'll explore the roots of ekphrastic writing in Greek literature, the great poems of the ekphrastic tradition (Keats, Auden, etc.), the work of famous art critics (Ruskin, Pater, etc.), and the diverse ways artists themselves have written about their own work (Motherwell, Martin, etc.). Students will learn how to approach an art object with openness and curiosity, become familiar with the vocabulary of art writing, and learn how to shape and structure their own writing in a variety of genres (essay, review, poem).