In their ambition to capture “real life,” Japanese painters, poets, novelists and photographers of the nineteenth century collaborated in ways seldom explored by their European contemporaries. This course offers learners the chance to encounter and appreciate behavior, moral standards and some of the material conditions surrounding Japanese artists in the nineteenth century, in order to renew our assumptions about what artistic “realism” is and what it meant.
Offered By
Words Spun Out of Images: Visual and Literary Culture in Nineteenth Century Japan
The University of TokyoAbout this Course
Skills you will gain
- Art History
- Poetry Writing
- Art
- History
Offered by

The University of Tokyo
The University of Tokyo was established in 1877 as the first national university in Japan. As a leading research university, UTokyo offers courses in essentially all academic disciplines at both undergraduate and graduate levels and conducts research across the full spectrum of academic activity.
Syllabus - What you will learn from this course
Samurai Portraits
One good way to gauge the distance between literary and visual culture in early modern Japan is to examine the ways in which painters and poets depicted their contemporaries. Portraits of samurai are especially rich in information about how men at the top of the social ladder wished to be “viewed” as physical entities, and how they expressed themselves as moral actors within society. In the first module, we will learn the basic formal aspects of samurai portraiture, and at the same time begin to interpret poems and prose inscribed onto the images themselves.
Painted Beauties
Visual images of women produced in Japan before the introduction of photography can be divided into two types: portraits of women who actually existed in society, and painted or printed images of idealized “beauties,” whose resemblance to physical reality was subsumed often to an intense interest in mode and situational aspect. Like samurai portraits, images of women, both real and imagined, would often be inscribed with texts which instruct viewers how to understand and appreciate them. In this module, we will overview several painted and printed images, and learn how contemporary viewers used these images and their texts as a tool to understand the world.
The Literary Photograph I
What methods did early modern Japanese artists and writers have at hand to “capture the moment,” and how did these methods influence the introduction and adaption of western photography in the mid-nineteenth century? In this module we will see how photographic modes of representation were assimilated into the literary tradition of portraiture, which was covered in modules 1 and 2.
The Literary Photograph II
Our final module traces the trajectory of the literary photograph from the end of the long nineteenth century into Japan’s modern era. Photographic images of the human figure in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Japan were often accompanied by literary writing inscribed either on the image itself, or on its reverse side. Modern novelists sometimes published photographs with short poems as captions. We will wrap up our course with a summary of how visual and written modes of representation colluded, and combined to produce powerful documents of social and psychological actuality.
Reviews
- 5 stars85.28%
- 4 stars11.42%
- 3 stars2.66%
- 2 stars0.31%
- 1 star0.31%
TOP REVIEWS FROM WORDS SPUN OUT OF IMAGES: VISUAL AND LITERARY CULTURE IN NINETEENTH CENTURY JAPAN
A very inspiring and informative course. Really broadened my ways of viewing not only Japanese art and literature, but also any other form of art from any part of the world.
the lecturer is knowledgeable and engaging. it greatly enriched my appreciation of japanese arts and culture. i highly recommend it.
Robert Cambell is clearly knowledgeable and very motivated to share his knowledge to others. Sometimes he deviates from his main topic and that makes it difficult to keep track of his main point.
It was such a wonderful course and I'm glad that I've gained an insight into the literary culture of Japan as well as the visual elements associated with it.
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