Time Schedule:
Daniel J Griesbach
ENGL 200
Seattle Campus
Techniques and practice in reading and enjoying literature. Examines some of the best works in English and American literature and considers such features of literary meaning as imagery, characterization, narration, and patterning in sound and sense. Emphasis on literature as a source of pleasure and knowledge about human experience.
Class description
For SUMMER 2007: Literature and Photography: This course introduces the study of literature by exploring the relationship between literature and photography. At times we will find direct connections between the two, as when writers comment on photography or vice-versa. But for the most part it is our task to put these two media in conversation, comparing and contrasting different kinds of content and matters of form. The primary text for this course is the collaborative book by James Agee (writer) and Walker Evans (photographer), Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. This challenging but perennially rewarding work is about southern sharecropper families during the Great Depression, but it is equally about revolutionizing the documentary use of words and pictures. Examples of writing and photographic work in America in the 19th and 20th centuries constitute the rest of the material we will examine. Readings include a sampling of poetry by Whitman and American modernists, a novella by Stephen Crane, and a short novel by Thomas Pynchon. As we read, we will also survey the work of exemplary American photographers, photographic circles, and movements, including Matthew Brady, Alfred Stieglitz and pictorialism, Lewis Hine, the 1930s FSA photographers (Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, and others), and Diane Arbus. To gauge the actions, reactions, and interactions among writing and photography, we will have some recurrent questions to pose, such as: what counts as artistic/literary subject matter? What is the position of the writer or photographer vis-à-vis his or her subject? What are some of the ways literary and visual art relate to technology? How do words and images represent social difference, like class, race, and gender? How do texts construct or imply their own audiences? What makes art socially critical? What do instances of cross-pollination, when images appear in texts and text in images, teach us? Course work will include active participation in class discussion, a group presentation, some short writing assignments, and two papers that add up to 10-15 pages.
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