Tuesday, April 20, 2004

The Magic of Images These comments about Camille Paglia's article "The Magic of Images: Word and Picture in a Media Age" in the electronic journal Arion are taken from the electronic release of the 4/20/2004 Chronicle of Higher Education. Both the article and the electronic journal  are worth perusing. Certainly any instructor or instructional designer must be concerned about the important role of images in facilitating instruction. (Arion articles are available in both html and pdf formats.) JH _____ A glance at the winter issue of "Arion": Teaching with images. Because higher education has not adjusted to "the massive transformation in Western culture since the rise of electronic media," a generation raised on television and the personal computer is "unmoored from the mother ship of culture," argues Camille Paglia, a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts. Since the 1960s, popular culture has become "the culture of American students," to the degree that "interest in and patience with long, complex books and poems have alarmingly diminished," she writes. That is because students are not provided with ways to analyze a flood of "disconnected images" and place them in historical context, she suggests. Higher education has provided, instead, "ironically self-referential or overtly politicized and jargon-ridden paradigms," like postmodernism, that have only confused students more, she says. But students, far from needing postmodernism's "subversion of rationalist assumptions," now need "the most basic introduction to structure and chronology." Talented visual artists, meanwhile, are flocking to animation, video games, and other products of the modern computer world, where images increasingly are transmitted in "flashing, even blinding, strobelike effects." Higher education must, she contends, slow the images down. That could be done through "a dynamic fusion of literature, art, and intellectual history," in discussions of visual works that have "a magic, mythological, or intensely emotional aspect," from "the frankly carnal images of the Italian Renaissance" to images like the Aztec glass skull. Such images, she says, could help students to "bridge the vast distance between the archaeological past and futuristic cyberspace." The article, "The Magic of Images: Word and Picture in a Media Age," is available online at http://www.bu.edu/arion/   11:25:30 AM    COMMENT []