Literature and Visual Arts
Cod: 31095
Department: DH
ECTS: 6
Scientific area: Literature
Total working hours: 156
Total contact time: 15

The curricular unit has the following objectives:
. to explore the specificity of the relationship between literature and European arts.
. to ponder on the importance of a speculative tradition in the dialogue between literature and European arts.
. to describe the emergence of this relationship in Classical Antiquity.
. to analyze the importance of Lessing’s theoretical contribution.
. to problematize the emergence of a Modernist and Post-modernist meta-critical discourse.

  1. Literature
  2. Arts
  3. Interdisciplinarity

The curricular unit aims to develop the following competences:
. the domain of conceptual and methodological tools in an interdisciplinary domain;
. the capacity to elaborate on topics while using the required conceptual tools;
. the capacity to build a critical and rational approach of the object;
. the capacity to ponder on the speculative dimension of the chosen object;
. the capacity to problematize the epistemological dimension inerent to the state of the arts on the chosen object.

Classical background
1.Homer’s Iliad – the shield of Achilles and the “ekphrasis”;
2.Sign and epistem;
3.Theoretical approaches in Greece (Plato and Artistotle, the concept of “mimesis”);
4.Theoretical approach in Rome (Horace’s concept of “ut pictura poesis”).
The 19th century’s revision
1.Lessing and the arts of space and time;
2.The emergence of the Museum and Romanticism;
3.Baudelaire – a discorse on modernity;
4.The Pré-Raphaelites and the epistemic change.
From Modernis to Post-modernism
1.Creative heritages;
2.Irony and memory;
3.Critical essays;
4.The word beyond the figurative.

Avelar, Mário. Ekpkrasis – O poeta no atelier do artista (Chamusca: Cosmos, 2006)
Baudelaire, Charles. A Invenção da Modernidade (Sobre Arte, Literatura e Música) (Lisboa: Relógio D’Água, 2006)
Heffernan, James A. W.. A Museum of Words – The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993)
Malraux, André. O Museu Imaginário (Lisboa: Edições 70, 1963)
Praz, Mario. Mnemosyne – El paralelismo entre la literatura y las artes visuales (Madrid: Taurus, 1979)

E-learning.

Continuous assessment is privileged: 2 digital written documents (e-folios) during the semester (40%) and a final digital test, Global e-folio (e-folio G) at the end of the semester (60%). In due time, students can alternatively choose to perform one final exam (100%).

Students are required to have good knowledge of English.