32202

SoSe 21: A Country Imagined: Literary and Photographic Narratives Since 1970

Koen Potgieter

Kommentar

This course explores the cross-pollination between American photography and literature since the 1970s. The decade signaled a great increase in the esteem of photography as an art form, an esteem modeled to a significant degree on the idea of the photographer as a fully fledged literary voice, expressing an inner consciousness. At the same time, as Susan Sontag wrote in 1977, ‘the Whitmanesque mandate to record in its entirety the extravagant candors of actual American experience has gone sour’ in this period. Indeed, in both literature and photography, the era's postmodern turn threw age-old questions about the representation of reality—and the romantic “I” figure that was implied behind the text—into stark relief. We will explore how literature and photography in the United States were shaken up by these ideas, and see how they eventually repositioned themselves as chroniclers of the life of the nation. Special emphasis will be placed on works in which writing and visuals are combined, for example Bernadette Mayer’s Memory (1975) and Jim Goldberg’s Rich and Poor (1985). Other texts we will discuss include: Michel Foucault What is an Author, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, Raymond Carver’s Cathedral and Rachel Kushner’s The Hard Crowd. Schließen

Zusätzliche Termine

Fr, 16.04.2021 12:00 - 14:00