Christopher Bolton on Visual Criticism
Welcome to the weekly IMS seminar!
About the seminar:
Visual Criticism:
I have spent much of my career writing comparatively about Japanese popular visual media, asking what a given medium--like animation, woodblock prints, or puppet theater--can do that other media cannot. But arguably the books I've written and edited have all subordinated these visual media to the medium of prose, by translating visual effects or meanings into written description. In the last several years I have been experimenting with other modes of criticism that try to make a rigorous argument not in only words but visually. I would like to tell you about two of these projects. The first is a large art exhibition of Japanese popular culture that I curated at the Williams College Museum of Art in 2021-22, where the artworks were chosen and arranged in the gallery so as to visualize and spatialize an argument about the origins and the nature of Japanese popular culture. The other is my current project, a series of animated videos that explain the structuralist moment in critical theory, from Ferdinand de Saussure through Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes. Many of these critics used charts, tables, and diagrams in their writing to make their arguments. My videos focus on drawing, redrawing, and animating these diagrams in the hope of shedding some new light on this theory, particularly its visual dimensions.
Bio:
Christopher Bolton is the Chair and Edward Dorr Griffin Professor of Comparative Literature at Williams College, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he teaches courses in Japanese literature and visual culture, world literature, and literary theory. He’s the author of Interpreting Anime (2018) and Sublime Voices: Science and Fiction in the Work of Abe Kōbō (2009), and has co-edited many volumes of criticism focused on anime and Japanese popular culture. His current research interests center on media comparison, and particularly the question of how different visual media think through critical problems in different ways.
How to attend:
To attend the seminar online, please email ims@lnu.se