ENGL 73.01 In the Image: Photography, Writing, and the Documentary Turn
In 1942, the literary critic Alfred Kazin dismissed the documentary movement of the 1930s as a "sub-literature," a "vast granary of facts" from which poets and fiction writers might extract the raw material of true literature. Just a year before, though, James Agee and Walker Evans -- a journalist and photographer -- had published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a vast book, indeed, sprawling in its feverish devotion to the experimentation Agee and Evans believed necessary to even come close to telling a true story. Agee and Evans wanted it to be an object as much as a book, a challenge to literary culture; whatever it was, it wasn't "sub" anything. In this course we'll use the question of just what Agee's and Evan's combination of pictures and words might be as the heart of our exploration of the documentary sphere as encountered through the conjunction of text and image. In the first half of the course, we’ll be guided by critical thinkers as we look at creative works and write our own critical essays; in the second, we’ll be guided by creative work as we attempt our own even while we continue our conversations with more contemporary critical thinkers. Besides Agee and Evans, we’ll be encountering among others, photographers Robert Frank, Sally Mann, Stephen Shore, Helen Levitt, Wendy Ewald, Teju Cole, Jean Mohr, Tanja Hollander, and Roy DeCarava; literary journalists Leslie Jamison, Michael Lesy, John Jeremiah Sullivan, John Berger, and Charles Bowden; critics Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, John Szarkowski, Jerry Thompson, Susie Linfield, Jeff Allred, and bell hooks; and poets Claudia Rankine, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, Donald Justice, and Kevin Young.
Department-Specific Course Categories
Senior Seminar: Course Group III