JINS 3005 - William Blake’s Apocalyptic Art

This is an interdisciplinary seminar that brings you into contact with one of the most fascinating figures in modern art. English poet, painter, engraver, and printer William Blake (1757-1827) was a maverick in the art world of his day and prided himself on breaking the aesthetic rules of the establishment, using his art to confront the polite society of his day with images of the social injustices it concealed by those rules—the slave trade, the industrial exploitation of the marginalized, violence against women and children, the cruelties of Empire, and the hypocrisies of organized religion. A self-proclaimed apocalyptic prophet, he set out to overturn the world as we know it by revealing the revolutionary imaginative potential of “the One Human Form Divine.”

This seminar focuses on interpreting and analyzing the religious dimensions of Blake’s verbal and visual art, as contextualized in its own time. It challenges you to creatively interweave historical theology, literary criticism, and aesthetics in your own interpretive work, and it opens to you a synthetic way of thinking essential to negotiating the visual culture in which we live.

Prerequisite: JINS eligibility (55-95 credits applied).
Credit(s): 3
Course Attribute(s):

This course fulfills the Junior Interdisciplinary Writing-Enhanced Seminar Interconnecting Perspective of the Dialogues.
This course is a writing-enhanced course.