Contenu pour l'année 2023-24:

Spaces and landscapes in the English-speaking world (G. Cressman and H. Ibata)

From the English garden to North-American Land Art, from sublime and picturesque landscape painting to post-landscape photography, visual artists have given changing aesthetic, social and political meanings to the natural world that they have interacted with or represented. In the English-speaking world, the concept of landscape has thus been associated since the 17th century with a variety of artistic practices that reflect both changing apprehensions of the natural world and the contexts within which they have taken place, from economic and colonial appropriation of lands, to industrial transformation and environmental awareness. This seminar aims to focus on some of these practices, and to explore their connections with deeper historical and cultural evolutions, through the analysis of artwork, supported by theoretical texts.
The following topics will be examined:
- The English garden
- Rural England: From Georgic landscape painting to Constable
- Sublime and picturesque landscape painting
- British artist travelers and the cultural appropriation of colonial spaces
- The "spirit of the North" in Canadian landscape painting.
- Photographic reappropriations of landscape painting
- Landscape photography and conceptual art
- Post-landscape photography (ruins, environmental destruction, etc.)



 

The objectives of the course are:

• to foster a conceptualised reflection about specific aspects of anglophone cultures, which will be acquired by reading and analysing a variety of secondary sources, as well as by learning to place cultural or historical objects of study within their intellectual contexts.
• to make students aware of the various disciplinary angles through which a cultural or historical question may be examined and understood.
• To help them develop the capacity to explain an academic argument, identify its disciplinary bias and connect it with primary sources in a clear and coherent manner.

Suggested reading:
- Dennis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1984 (BNU)
- John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape, Cambridge University Press, 1983 (Bibliothèque langues)
- Simon Pugh (ed.), Reading Landscape: Country-city-capital, Manchester University Press, 1990.
- Michael Rosenthal, British Landscape Painting, London, Phaidon, 1982.
- Michael Rosenthal, ed., Prospects for the Nation: Recent Essays in British Landscape, 1750-1880, Yale University Press, 1997.
- Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art, Oxford University Press, 1999.
- Tom Williamson, Polite Landscapes, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
- W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.), Landscape and Power (University of Chicago Press, 1994).