Call for letter of interest
The Book & Paper Program partners every year with Professor Ken Daley in the English Department to produce letterpress printed broadsides or chapbooks for his Victorian Illustrated Poetry honors seminar. Sixteen students will work in pairs to produce 8 hand printed poems with linoleum cut images to accompany them during three, non-sequential classes in the 1104 letterpress studio. The selected graduate student will teach typesetting, basic design, and printing, and will oversee production of this project.
The Spring 2014 dates for this special section are: March 4; April 1; and April 29.
Interested students should sent a brief letter of interest to Melissa Potter at mpotter@colum.edu.
Course description
Professor Kenneth Daley
Tuesday: 12:30-3:20
kdaley@colum.edu
Victorian Illustrated Poetry
Honors Seminar
For a variety of social, economic, and technical/mechanical reasons, the production of book and magazine illustration increased dramatically during the Victorian period. In this seminar, we will focus on Victorian illustrated poetry and its dynamic interplay between image and word. We’ll consider the function and effect of illustration in general, as well as the theoretical issues and questions that are raised by the visual depiction/interpretation of poetry, the intertwining of visual and verbal representation. We will also pay attention to the illustrated book as a material object, a collaboration of many makers working within the context of particular human, institutional, and cultural relationships.
I hope that reading Victorian poetry in illustrated form will encourage us to pay closer attention to textual details, and will improve our understanding of how poetic devices like figurative language actually work. I hope too that thinking about the Victorian illustrated book as a material object will kindle our historical imagination and help make the period seem a little less distant and alien. Throughout the semester, we will be working at the Center for Book and Paper Arts to learn, first-hand, something about the process of producing Victorian illustrated poetry. Engaging with the specific historical and material conditions of Victorian illustrated book production – actually cutting and printing a block illustration, working with typeface, establishing a plan for a poem’s layout and illustration (the relation of image and text on the page), putting an (almost) Victorian-age cylinder press into action – will bring us closer to these Victorian art objects, material traces of our cultural inheritance.
