Modernist Literature and Photography

Students in this course study how photography, from its inception in the mid-19th century, rose into a dominant visual genre, and how modernist literature responded, with formal and critical inventions, to the prominence of the new technology. We ask how does such literature adapt to viewing the world through the 'eye' of the camera? What does a 'photographic' literature do? What does such writing look like? How does including photographs in a novel alter that novel? And how does such literature portray contemporary culture? The course begins by analyzing the new visual medium, in contrast to, and as an effect on, new literary writing, such as the first detective fiction invented by Edgar Allan Poe, and Charles Baudelaire's Paris poems or flânerie writing. These 19th century interplays of photography and literature lead to our exploration of how photography affects cultural and literary experimentations in modernist prose narratives (in writers such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf). Throughout the course, critical studies of photography and photographs, e.g. Susan Sontag's On Photography, build student abilities to cross study photography and literature. The work of "Modernist Literature and Photography" begins and ends, we might say, with the words Ludwig Wittgenstein: "Don't take it as a matter of course, but as a remarkable fact, that pictures and fictitious narratives give us pleasure, occupy our minds."