This seminar will introduce new graduate students in the History of Art to one of the most important methodological problems of their chosen discipline: the tension between on the one hand, "formalism" (the study of art as an autonomous enterprise wherein the formal elements and organization of specific works are analyzed chiefly in terms of their transformation of preexisiting material, whether of the outside world or previous works), and on the other, "contextualism" (an approach which seeks to reintegrate the work of art within the context of its making and consumption, foregrounding its status as both historical document and act of social communication). Through a reading of major critical texts by Fiedler, Hildebrand, Riegl, Wölfflin, Bell, Fry, Shklovskii, Jakobson, Bakhtin/Medvedev, Greenberg, Schapiro, Fried, Clark, Krauss, Bois, Jameson, Lippard, and others, this tension will be examined in its various historical and regional manifestations from the late-19th century to the present. The seminar is a reading course with short in-class presentations required: there will be no final paper. While primarily intended for students in the Department, the course is also open to other interested graduate students with the permission of the instructor. (Gough,)