Photography in American Literature 4219-RS222
Session 1
Introduction / Overview
Research component: Introduction to the research component
Session 2
Nathanael Hawthorne and Daguerreotype
Hawthorne, “The Prophetic Pictures,” “Sights from a Steeple”
Recommended:
“Daguerreotype Images of a Disposable Past” from Williams, Through the Negative, 1–37.
Research component: FLOATING SESSION: Professor Pawel Frelik will give a training session on using Zotero and/or Endnote
Session 3
Walt Whitman’s Photographic Imagination
“Specimen Daze: Whitman’s Photobiography” from Meehan, 181–216
Recommended:
Orvell, “Whitman’s Transformed Eye” from The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 pp. 3–29.;
Ed Folsom, “Whitman and Photographs of the Self,” “Whitman and Photography” from Walt Whitman’s Native Representations, pp. 99¬177
Session 4
Henry James and Alvin Langdon Coburn
From Preface to The Golden Bowl 1909, and Alvin Langdon Coburn, “Illustrating Henry James,” 1953/1966
Recommended:
David McWhirter, “Photo-Negativity: The Visual Rhetoric of James’s and Coburn’s New York Edition Frontispieces”
Emily Setina, “Photography, Revision, and the City in Henry James’s New York Edition and Alvin Langdon Coburn’s London” in Picturing America: Photography and the Sense of Place (Leiden, Brill) 49–69.
“Henry James and Alvin Langdon: The Frame of Prevision” from Schloss, pp. 55–89.
“Visual Culture: The Photo Frontispieces to the New York Edition” by Ira B. Nadel, from Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship, ed. by David Bruce McWhirter
Research component: Select the primary text (lit/cult) / paper topic (social science)
Session 5
Theodore Dreiser and Alfred Stieglitz
Recommended:
Carol Schloss, “Theodore Dreiser, Alfred Stieglitz, and Jacob Riis: Envisioning ‘The Other Half’” from In Visible Light, 129-138.
Research component:
Research + reading
Session 6
Stephen Crane
Megan Williams, “Snapshots of Memory and the Flashes of History in Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage” from Through the Negative
Recommended:
“Imaging the Civil War: Authenticity in Painting, Photography and The Red Badge of Courage”
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/crane/images/section3.html
Session 7
William Faulkner
“Evangeline” (1931), 1971
Paper proposal + annotated bibliography (+ literature review in social science)
Session 8
John Updike
“The Day of the Dying Rabbit,” 1969; “White on White,” 1973
Recommended
Updike, John. “Visual Trophies.” New Yorker 12/24/2007, Vol. 83 Issue 41, 144–48.
Session 9
Authors’ Portraits and Self-Portraits
Nadel, Ira B. “The American Image of Ezra Pound.” Paideuma 34.2&3 (2005): 121-48.
Bukhar, Nuzhat. „The Distinguished Shaman: T. S. Eliot’s Portrait in Modern Art.” Modernism/modernity 2004: 373–424.
Session 10
Eudora Welty as a Professional Photographer
“Petrified Man” and “Flowers for Marjorie”
Recommended:
Harriet Pollack and Suzanne Marrs, “Seeing Welty’s Political Vision in Her Photographs.”
Research component: Paper outline – 1st version (note that the outline will typically go through several revisions)
Session 11
Raymond Carver
“Viewfinder,” “So Much Water,” “Cathedral”
Recommended
Amir, Ayala. Visual Poetics of Raymond Carver. Blue Ridge Summit: Rowman & Littlefied, 2010.
Dobozy, Tamas. “Raymond Carver in the Viewfinder.” Canadian Review of American Studies 41. 3 (2011): 279-298.
Session 12
Sylvia Plath and Photography
Recommended:
Anita Helle, “‘The Photographic Chamber of the Eye’: Plath, Photography, and the Post-Confessional Muse” in Representing Sylvia Plath ed. By Sally Bayley and Tracy Brain (Cambridge UP), 32–53.
Anita Helle, “Reading Plath Photographs: In and Out of Museum,” from The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath, 182-210.
Session 13
Natasha Trethewey
Selected poems from Bellocq’s Ophelia: Poems
Recommended
Rindge, Debora and Anna Leahy. “Become What You Must”: Trethewey's Poems and Bellocq's Photographs English Language Notes (2006) 44 (2): 291–305.
Research component: Paper – 1st draft
Session 14
Feedback to paper drafts
All the assigned texts will be uploaded in this folder:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0ByjL52c_KaDKZTU0UWV6ZGxEQVk?usp=sharing
Course coordinators
Type of course
proseminars
Learning outcomes
A student who has completed the course
Knowledge
- Has systematic knowledge about the various ways in which photography has influenced literature
- Knows and understands the role of photography in the history of American literature
- Is familiar with the ways in which writers have used photography to identify and promote their styles and their public image
Skills
- has the necessary knowledge to use terms and research paradigms used in analyses of twentieth-century literature and its links to photography and painting.
- knows how to seek, analyze, and use information from a variety of sources
- knows how to perform an interdisciplinary analysis of materials combining visual arts and literature
Competences
- because of frequent group work, students will learn how to lead and organize team work, assuming responsibility for the results
- follows cultural events, photography exhibitions in particular.
- has improved his qualifications necessary to participate in a discussion
Assessment criteria
1. The general rule at the ASC is that a student can’t miss more than two classes if she or he wants to complete the course, regardless of the reasons (including health reasons!)
2. Toward the end of this semester each of you will have to submit a paper (10–15 pages long, Chicago Notes-and-Bibliography style) 50%. Final version of the paper due 10 days before the end of exam session.
3. Other assignments:
a. Participation: 10 % of the final grade
b. Paper proposal and annotated bibliography 10%
c. PowerPoint presentation: 30%
GRADING SCALE:
1. The benchmark is set at 60 percent—that is, completing 60 percent of the requirements is necessary for the passing grade.
Final grading scale (total from the above):
over 98% – 5!
90-97% – 5
85-89% – 4,5
84-75% – 4
70-74% – 3,5
60-69% – 3
Bibliography
Amir, Ayala. Visual Poetics of Raymond Carver. Blue Ridge Summit: Rowman & Littlefied, 2010.
Beeston, Alix. In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Clayton, O. Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850-1915. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Dobozy, Tamas. “Raymond Carver in the Viewfinder.” Canadian Review of American Studies 41. 3 (2011): 279-298.
Folsom, Ed. Walt Whitman’s Native Representations. Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Henninger, Katherine. Ordering the Facade: Photography and Contemporary Southern Women’s Writing. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2007.
Meehan, Sean Ross. American Autobiography: Photography in Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, and Whitman. University of Missouri, 2008.
Millichap, Joseph R. The Language of Vision: Photography and Southern Literature in the 1930s and After. LSU 2016.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994.
North, Michael. Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Orvell, M. The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940
Rugg, Linda Haverty. Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography.
Schloss, Carol. In Visible Light: Photography and the American Writer, 1840-1940. Oxford University Press, 1987.
Sim, Lorraine. Ordinary Matters: Modernist Women’s Literature and Photography. Bloomsbury, 2016.
Williams, Megan. Through the Negative: The Photographic Image and the Written Word in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Routledge, 2003.