Rhetoric of the Image

What is art? What is science? And are distinctions—whether imagined, philosophical, histori-cal, or practical—between the two critical to any productive conception of them? This course probes literature from and about both art and science in order interrogate this operative dis-tinction, in turn questioning how both histories and practices of “art” and “science” implicit-ly or explicitly stake out their limits. To do so, we examine a series of configurations that have wound themselves into the texts of art and science: Life/Automaton, Vision/Knowledge, Uni-versal/Particular, Self/Genius, Future/Past, Artifice/Facture, Hierarchy/Equality, Globes/Domains, Beauty/Ugly, Big/Small. We examine such “formations of meaning” across space and time, and across domains of practice. We look to the play of these terms in artistic and scientific discourse and practice in order to gain a sense of how the relationship between art and science has been imagined and enacted.