While Virginia Woolf acknowledges that in the end painting and writing must part ways, after sustained close reading of the paintings of Walter Sickert she says, “let us hold painting by the hand a moment longer, for…painting and writing have much to tell each other: they have much in common. The novelist after all wants to make us see.” While that gap between text and image cannot be overcome, as Woolf says, pictures “stir words in us” and color provides an “orgy of blood and nourishment.” Students enter the classroom saturated with text and image making visual literacy an important facet of literary studies. My background in visual art and research in aesthetics allows me to bring visual strategies, art criticism, theory, and art history into literature course lectures and activities. Rather than limited to universal visual standards, I strive to teach my students that aesthetics is interconnected with experience making it inherently embodied, multiple, and diverse, revealing bias and truths within texts, art, others, and ourselves.

 

Seeking to stir words through images, I employ a variety of visual instruction methods and activities in my courses. One activity encourages close reading through drawing. Getting students to slow down and pay attention while also providing a fun change of pace in a writing course, students create simple drawings of a Blake poem or moment in a Joyce story, followed by group discussion of the significance of the images and what they contribute to the narrative. A group discussion of a painting in conjunction with a Tennyson or a Rosetti poem offers a visual entry point into the poem’s subject matter and how the painting aids or modifies our understanding. Additionally, in visual media journals, students reflect on how a visual work informs their understanding of a text. For instance, does Élizabeth Vigée Le Brun’s portrait of Marie Antoinette support or depart from the politics of Edmund Burke’s revolution letter? This provides an opportunity to engage questions of intended audience and issues of social exclusion and inequality. Close reading of images helps students practice identifying small details and talk about how they fit into the bigger picture of image or text. Lastly, group mind map activities on the board provide a visual way of tracking and organizing themes in the text, the class discussion itself, and facilitates deeper dives into the text, and discovery of connections. 

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I strive for relatable class activities that are driven by the spirit of the text to deliver the skills of analysis, synthesis, interpretation, and evaluation. For instance, in groups of two, students are asked to write a series of tweets or text messages staging an argument between Mary Wollstonecraft, Edmund Burke, and Thomas Paine. The more casual genre allows the students to simplify and paraphrase key ideas from the text using informal language in a creative way that aids close reading, analysis, and comprehension and highlights stylistic differences in diction and conventions in the rhetorical situation of the original texts and the digital genre. In another group activity students form a museum or magazine job search committee considering four nineteenth century art critic candidates: Mathew Arnold, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde. To form the hiring decision requires understanding each candidate, such as Arnold’s “disinterestedness” or Pater’s personal impression, and matching it with what the group is looking for in a writer. This activity also provides opportunities to practice professional skills of interviewing, formal writing, collaboration, and task delegation, as well as an opportunity to reflect on what the student thinks about art and how different definitions of beauty affect them and others. 

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The visual approach I have developed is a product of working with an extremely diverse student population. Class discussions activities are designed to ease the process and ensure first-generation, shy, anxious, non-native speakers, and differently abled students are all able to actively participate. Pair-and-share activities and pre-discussion activities like writing down a quote and thoughts about it on an index card, help everyone feel ready to talk. Responding to discussion posts and essay drafts of their classmates gives students the opportunity to learn from one another and experience diverse perspectives. The goal of my instruction is replacing exclusionary judgements with, as Walter Pater would say, knowing “one’s own impression as it really is,” which encourages students to critically reflect how a given image or text impacts them, what the message of the work is, who the target audience might be, and, most importantly, what they feel and think about the work.