Literature and Photography in 19th-century America ( Prof'in. Dr. Heike Schäfer)

In this course we will study how American writers responded to the emergence of modern visual culture. We will consider early photographic practices and read nineteenth-century fiction, essays, and poetry about the art of light writing, as photo graphy translates from Greek. We will examine how photography expanded the repertoire of representational techniques and the range of aesthetic experience available to nineteenth-century artists, writers, and audiences. By sampling images and texts across genres, including contemporary criticism, we will track how the new medium changed perceptual habits and affected how people understood such fundamental issues as subjectivity, creativity, representation, and reality.