Textual and Visual Cultures

Over the course of the twentieth century, the idea of texts and textual cultures has expanded beyond standard and traditional materials, media, and genres. Not only do we study widely recognized and canonical forms of literature within the ambit of this discipline, but the scope of literary studies and literary analysis has expanded to include all manners of texts - from life-writing, travel accounts, and oral literatures to notebooks, diaries, letters, and newspapers. The cultural, social, and historical conditions in which texts are produced, consumed, circulated, and preserved now form an important component of such research. How the digital turn has critically transformed textual cultures is also a subject of particular interest and concern. What does it mean to read a classic today? What does it mean to read Rumi, Ghalib, or Faiz in quick, digestible quotes on Instagram or Twitter? How does technology shape the engagement of the digital-born generation with the written word, and vice-versa? Scholars working on the intersections of multiple disciplines attempt to answer these questions using both long-standing, traditional methods in the study of texts as well as new methods made possible by advances in computing and the ability of machines to deal with large volumes of data.

Furthermore, there are implications here for creative visual expression, which has been democratized by technology. Visual culture stands at the intersection of power and visuality. Yet, visual culture is the one form of mass and niche culture that assumes and requires no literacy. We consume more images of the ravages of war, the furies of nature, humanity’s triumph of space, heartbreak on a football field, and the tenacity of a bee than we ever have in history. Visual culture studies interrogates technologies of production of visual culture, and attends to questions of how technologies operate. Necessarily multi-disciplinary, cultural critics, historians and digital technologists converge in visual culture studies to ask such questions as: What does the discursive field of a culture in which a visual event – creative or representative – entail today? What questions of medium specificity, genre, intermedial practice, cultural memory, praxis and performance hold?

Faculty involved: Nazia Akhtar, Sushmita Banerji