This course explores the relationship between visual culture and literary studies. Covering material from 1750 to the present, the course will consider various frameworks for thinking about the visual and the verbal. Engaging with core debates in visual culture studies, students will read seminal texts alongside more recent perspectives from anthropology, new materialism, and affect theory. Students will connect classic concepts in aesthetics (e.g. ekphrasis, the beautiful and the sublime, ut pictura poesis) with more recent discussions around desire and the gaze on the one hand, and media-specificity on the other. Students will reflect upon the shifting boundaries between high, low, and outsider culture, examining the role of the museum and social media respectively in determining what gets seen, who gets seen, and how. From Bentham’s panopticon and modern-day face recognition technology, students will discuss the relationship between technologies of vision and issues of power, surveillance, and objectivity. Discussing questions of spectacle, evidence, and simulation, students will examine the role of the image in producing and falsifying knowledge. Throughout the course, students will analyse how visual and verbal expression and representation are intertwined. By the end of the course, students would have learnt about useful ways to address the following questions: Who determines what and how we see? How do we make images, and how do images make us?