19700 Image, Text, Archive

This course examines hybrid image-texts of the last 150 years to investigate what happens to narrative and genre when visual images become integral parts of textual composition, and what kinds of claims such texts make about memory, veracity, or objectivity. We will examine the early history of photography and image reproduction, learn to formally read images, and interrogate the relationship of photography to documentary. Our readings will include Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1925), André Breton’s Nadja (1928), James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (1966), Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995) and Austerlitz (2001), and Anne Carson’s Nox (2009); critical readings will include texts by Roland Barthes, Margaret Iverson, Timothy Dow Adams, and Linda Hutcheon. (1830-1940, Theory)

Rachel Kyne
2018-2019 Winter