Mar 28, 2024  
2021-2022 Catalog 
    
2021-2022 Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

ENG 390 - Word Art


Word Art: Seeing in Black & White 

Instructor
Churchill

We live in an age of visual culture. To be literate, we need to read and interpret words and images, as well as the interactions between them. Word-Art examines texts that combine words and images, such as graphic novels, illuminated books, and visual poetry. Read and analyze word-art, and then create your own. The course is a double hybrid-word/image texts and critical/creative writing-designed to stimulate your critical and creative faculties. Take a creative approach to critical writing and apply critical thinking to your creative expression.

 Word-Art will respond to President Carol Quillen’s call for “Stories Yet to Be Told: Race, Racism and Accountability on Campus.” We will explore how words and images work together to construct, reinforce, challenge, and subvert racial legacies in America, with particular attention to constructions of Black and white. The Black/white binary has deep historical and conceptual ties to the word/image dialectic in Western culture. In addition to analyzing how words and images contribute to constructions of Black and white in America, students will draw upon the Library archives and Visual Art Center collections in order to create original Word-Art that tells as yet untold stories about race and racism at Davidson College.

Possible texts for study include:

  • Kyle Baker, Nat Turner
  • John Berger, Ways of Seeing
  • James Elkin, Just Looking
  • bell hooks, Black Looks
  • Tyehimba Jess, Olio
  • Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark
  • Claudia Rankine, Citizen 



Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies the Cultural Diversity requirement.