Spring 2024 Special Topic: American Photographs & American Narratives

“A picture is worth a thousand words.”  If so, how deceptively it works upon our hearts, our minds, and our imaginations! 

How has the camera shaped the way we see ourselves, and the world around us?  What kinds of ethical and aesthetic concerns are involved in recording "reality?"  How do photographs tell stories, and with what consequences?  In what ways do photographers borrow literary or political or scientific images, and how do writers and scholars in other fields borrow photographic techniques?  How have photographers--sometimes self-consciously and sometimes unwittingly--affected how we think about national identity? What does something “American” look like, anyway?

This seminar will explore these questions by looking at both pictures and stories.  We’ll concentrate on the late nineteenth century, when photography was a relatively new technology, to the mid-twentieth century, before new communications technologies changed the way still images were received.  We’ll look at a wide range of images through the lenses of, for example, fiction, documentary, photographic theory, photojournalism, catalogues, exhibits, and local archives; we’ll pair photographers and writers; and we’ll spend time in the present, looking backwards at old archives.  I anticipate that some of you will also look forward to how these questions inform our understanding of emerging technologies--at the end of the class, you’ll have an opportunity to explore these larger questions in a research topic of your choice.

Possibilities:

• Susan Sontag, On Photography
• John Berger and Jean Mohr, Another Way of Telling
• Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (with Emma Duncan Sewall)
• Yoshiko Uchida, Desert Exile (with Ansel Adams)
• James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
• Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava, The Sweet Flypaper of Life 
• Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller
• Lucy Lippard, Partial Recall

This course satisfies the DH "Digital Humanities" requirement for ENGL:TBD majors. 

This course satisfies a Post-1800 Literature requirement for ENGL:TBD, ENGL/JOURNALISM majors. 

This course may count as an Upper Level English elective for ENGL TEACHING majors. 

This course satisfies the general ENGLISH CAPSTONE for students following major requirement guidelines in place Fall 2023 and beyond. 

This course satisfies the ENGLISH LITERATURE Capstone requirement. 

This course may be taken for Capstone credit by general ENGLISH majors following requirement guidelines in place prior to Fall 2023. Fill out a Capstone Declaration form (available in the main English office,  Ham Smith 230F) if you wish to declare it as Capstone.