Literature Majors Seminar
Term 2
M, 2:00 – 3:00 p.m.
This course will examine the influence of photography and cinema on literary form. Photography has become such a common aspect of contemporary life that camera technology is now routinely built into our phones, computers, and automobiles. The photographic recording of everyday life provides an unprecedented archive of visual memories.
We will explore some of the following central questions: Given the increasing power of photographs and cinematography in the formation of private and public judgments, how have novelists, poets, dramatists, and film makers responded to these visual influences? What happens to the articulation of the written self when it confronts the power of photography? How have writers incorporated some of the techniques of photographic and cinematic ways of seeing into their forms of writing?
Readings will include Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, selected essays by Walter Benjamin, and Susan Sontag’s On Photography. We will also consider works of fiction, drama, and cinema that respond to our increasingly visual culture such as Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, Le Thi Diem Thuy’s The Gangster We are All Looking For, and films by Alfred Hitchcock (Rear Window), Michaelangelo Antonioni, (Blow-up), and Christopher Nolan (Memento).
Course requirements include a presentation, participation in weekly discussion, and a major essay.
