Course No: 350:560
Index #:
Distribution Requirement: A4, B, D
Tuesdays - 10:20 am
MU 207
Writing with Light: Photography and the 19th Century US
Dana Luciano
This seminar explores the relationship between photography and writing in the nineteenth century, focusing primarily on the U.S. We will consider the interplay of photography and print in evolving understandings of consciousness, affect, history, and time. Our discussion will be divided into three segments. The first, “What is Photography?” considers evolving understandings of the medium, its uses, and its meanings in the decades after its emergence; the second, “Photo/graphic Cases,” looks at a series of topics (race and racialization; romance and realism; landscapes of colonialism; war and commemoration; lyric and photographic time) through the lens of photographic history; and the third, “Dialectical Images,” takes up the question of photographic history itself, assessing the politics of time, method, and memory as photography illuminates them. 19th century writers may include Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Dion Boucicault, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, William J. Wilson, Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, W.E.B. DuBois, and Jacob Riis; photographers will include William Henry Fox Talbot, Augustus Washington, Matthew Brady, Andrew Gardner, Julia Margaret Cameron, William Mumler, Eadweard Muybridge, Edward S. Curtis, and numerous others, along with 21st century refractions by Carrie Mae Weems, Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, and Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins. Along the way, we will also encounter criticism and theory by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Jasmine Cobb, Shawn Michelle Smith, Maurice O. Wallace, Tina Campt, and Laura Wexler, among others. Students will give one in-class presentation and will write weekly reflection posts, a 4-6 page midsemester essay, and a 15-page final seminar paper or alternate format/public-facing project.