Repainting Starry Night: Visual/Textual Remediation and Analysis
Purpose of Exercise: Allows the students to look critically and interpretively at visual images as well as practicing close reading of texts. Combining visual and textual rhetoric as separately and collaboratively important helps student prepare for a visual/textual analysis paper. A nice introduction to remediation as well if you are beginning P3 in ENC 2135 (here's a blog about teaching remediation).
Description: For this activity, you will use Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night,” Robert Fagles’s “The Starry Night.” Anne Sexton’s “The Starry Night,” and Don McLean’s “Vincent” (NOFX has a cover of this, too) in order to have the students move past summarizing visual images and begin to closely analyze images as they would texts. Students will not only analyze images and texts separately but also see the intersections between visual and textual elements and develop an appreciation for how this relationship can alter our understanding of works that incorporate both aspects (such as films).
Suggested Time: 30 minutes or an entire class period, depending on the length of the discussion.
Procedure: Divide the students into groups of three or four; each group should be assigned one poem/song dealing with Vincent’s painting. You can have the students complete these readings prior to the day you do this activity or you can have them read over their specific poem/song in the groups.
Have the groups closely analyze the words and the meaning behind the poem/song. It helps to have the artwork displayed in the background (or print off a picture for each group). Ask the students for similarities between the words of the poem and the visuals in the painting. Have any images in the painting inspired certain parts of the poem? What image/color in the painting struck the author of the poem/song? What first strikes each student? Has the author altered anything in the painting? What details are lost or added in these “translations”? Do these textual “translations” convey a different meaning or evoke another emotion?
Next begin with a general discussion about the painting, focusing on the students’ own interpretation of it. Next, I go around to each group and closely analyze the words of the poems and song in connection with the image. Before you discuss McLean’s song, I like to play the song, which allows us to also analyze the tone of the music; I ask them how the music element may explain or alter the feeling evoked by the painting or the song. I also ask the students questions about the different titles each artist chooses to use, the different occupations of Van Gogh, Fagles, Sexton, and McLean (what do they have in common?), and if religion becomes a important aspect in any of the interpretations to Van Gogh’s painting, or even in the painting itself.
Discussion/Follow-up:
At the end of the discussion, you could have each group make their own song or poem based on their interpretation. What part do they want to focus on? What would their title be? Even if the students do not create their own poem or song, you could have a discussion about the possible titles or images they would focus on in their own version. You can also point out that there is not one correct interpretation of a visual text, which these poems and song demonstrate. Do all these texts together show us something about intertextuality or shared cultural meanings of texts?
Additional Information: Developed from Robert Atwan’s “Guidelines for Writing about Visual Art” (found in Convergences) provides an understanding of how to analyze an image and how to treat the image as a type of “text.” Atwan’s questions, paired with my love of Don McLean’s “Vincent,” lead to this exercise.