Since the inception of photography, writers have been integrating photographs into their work to create rich, multilayered texts, and photographers have long produced images that incorporate, respond to – sometimes even resist – written texts. In this twelve-week course, we will focus on the ever-evolving collaboration between writing and photography, so as to question the nature of the relationship between texts and images. We will address a range of genres (life writing, fiction, and poetry), media and practices (newspapers, graphic novels, family albums, postcards, etc.), and issues (trauma and memory, racial and gender issues, (post)memory, modernity, mass media). Our discussion will be based on a number of primary and secondary texts. Handouts will be provided for each seminar with extracts from critical secondary sources and questions for discussion.
