No Class Monday Oct. 22 (but, a lecture!)

Hi everyone,

I just became aware of a lecture taking place at the same time as our class next Monday (Oct. 22) at the U of C, that I'm recommending everyone attend if you can. In order to make this possible, I'm cancelling our class meeting this week. The group that was to prepare questions for this week will send them to me, and I'll make copies available for the class next time we meet.

The lecture is entitled "Limits of Visual Studies" and the speaker is James Elkins, from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. For the past decade, James Elkins has been at the forefront of the development of Visual Studies (or Visual Culture studies), authoring more than 20 books on vision, visibility, and art. I think this lecture presents a great link with our class, and I hope you'll try to make it. I will be posting a short writing assignment related to the lecture in the next couple days; for those of you who do not attend the lecture, I will come up with another (likely much more onerous) assignment to fill the 10% assignment listed on our syllabus.

Limits of Visual Studies
Lecture by James Elkins
Monday, October 22, 2007
7:00 PM
Boris Roubakine Hall (Craigie Hall C105)
University of Calgary
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Visual studies is expanding rapidly, with new programs being developed throughout the world. At the same time, it is not expanding into the generalized study of visuality that it was initially imagined to be. Instead it is condensing around a small number of images and theorists, and is being read by an increasingly constrained community of scholars. This talk reviews some strengths and weaknesses of visual studies, in anticipation of the 2011 conference called "Farewell to Visual Studies."