Unflattening Texts: Words, Pictures, & Meaning

In Unflattening Texts, a Spring 2016 graduate seminar, we will question connections both historical and contemporary between language and image, and we will hazard hypotheses about how humans have woven meanings from combinations of the two.

The seminar has a historical slant, but we welcome participants who specialize in all eras. Using the work of a contemporary graphic artist/author/theorist as our initial guide, we will consider how pictures & language merge and diverge. On the concrete example of the1557 True History of Hans Staden, the tale of a German mercenary who was held captive by a people native to northern Brazil in the sixteenth century and later wrote an early European best-selling book about the “cannibals” he encountered. Participants will contribute texts from their fields of study to expand our discussion and debate about the hegemony of verbal over visual text and to consider how the written word has played out in different eras and in different cultural contexts.

The course is Languages & Cultures 639/ German 659/ English 665/ Comparative Literature 650. Please contact the professor, Lynne J. Miles-Morillo via email (mimo@purdue.edu) regarding the initial meeting, when we will determine a seminar time suitable to all of us.