In this course we will look at illuminated manuscripts, illustrated books, collages, cut-ups, artists' books, graphic novels, graffiti texts, hypertexts, and other, ultimately unclassifiable creations (what Blake once called "unnam'd forms").

Our working assumption will be that many texts (more than you might think) exhibit complex visual and graphical layers of meaning. Learning how to recognize and read the often richly choreographed relations between a text's visual appearance and its literary content -- its medium and its message -- can be both a way of shedding new light on familiar material and a critical survival skill in the face of the hypermediated rhetoric of our own post-alphabetic media culture.