Undergraduate Courses
Rhetoric
024: Freshman Seminar
|
|
ScheduledFall 2012 Instructor(s)
Michael Mascuch
The
Fiat Lux book is a classic example of a corporate publicity brochure on grand scale. What image of the University of California, and more specifically, what image of UC Berkeley, is projected through Adams’s
Fiat Lux portfolio? How are Adams’s photographs rhetorical—in other words, how do they persuade us of their vision? We will explore these and related questions by contextualizing Adams’s work, seeing it alongside other portfolios of photographs depicting UC Berkeley, California and the US from roughly the same period.
The class will meet for seven two-hour sessions in the first seven weeks of the semester (8/23-10/4). Students will complete one 5-7-page final interpretive essay due by the end of the semester.
Please have read John Berger’s
Ways of Seeing before the first class meeting, as we will be discussing it then. Copies of each of the course texts will be available on reserve in Moffitt Library, and copies of
Ways of Seeing and
Where I Was From will be available for purchase at the campus textbook store. (You will have received a reprinted copy of
Fiat Lux as a gift from the campus upon registration.) PDFs of
People’s Park,
The Trouble in Berkeley,
Public Relations,
Yosemite and the Range of Light, and
California will be on the course bspace site. I will screen
Berkeley in the Sixties in the Media Resources Center in Moffitt Library, on dates to be decided at the first class meeting.
Required Reading
Adams, Ansel & Nancy Newhall,
Fiat Lux: The University of California (McGraw-Hill, 1967; repr. 2012)
Adams, Ansel,
Yosemite and the Range of Light (New York Graphic Society, 1979)
Adams, Robert,
California: Views by Robert Adams of the Los Angeles Basin, 1978-1983 (Frankel Gallery, 2000)
Berger, John,
Ways of Seeing (Penguin, 1970)
Copeland, Alan,
People’s Park (Ballantine Books, 1969)
Didion, Joan,
Where I Was From (Knopf, 2003)
Warshaw, Steven,
The Trouble in Berkeley (Diablo Press, 1965)
Winogrand, Garry,
Public Relations (Museum of Modern Art, 1977)
Suggested Reading
Kitchell, Mark (director),
Berkeley in the Sixties (1990)
