Encounters with Visual Art in contemporary literature

What can creative writing about art tell us about perspective and the particularly complex and messy times we live in? How can language defamiliarise the visual in ways that allow for new ways of seeing? These questions will be taken up in this course exploring how writers glean from art ways of engaging with the contemporary world. Following an introductory session featuring classic examples of ekphrasis (the vivid description of an artwork in language), we will then turn to contemporary examples of ekphrastic poetry, an experimental short story, and creative modes of art criticism by contemporary writers.