First-Year Writing Seminar: Photo-Graphic Selves: The Art of the Visual Memoir

Semester and Year	FA 2012
Course Number	FIRST-UG391
Section	001
Instructor	Tahneer Oksman
Days	Tue,Thu
Time	9:30 AM - 10:45 AM
Units	4.0
Level	U
Foundation Requirement

Notes/Restrictions

Open to Gallatin first-year students only.

Description

This course will focus on the interplay of images and words in autobiographical texts. We will ask what it means to represent the self on the page, and how the added element of the visual – including photographs and graphic images – complicates the many negotiations involved in self-portraiture. What, if anything, do pictures convey that words cannot? How does the inclusion of images or descriptions of images affect the ways we tell, or the ways that others read, our lives? Do the formal differences between visual images that are hand-drawn, as in comics, and those that appear more “realistic,” like photographs, change how we approach personal narratives? Throughout the semester, students will become acquainted with the basic theories and vocabularies surrounding the intersections between the visual and the verbal. They will write four formal essay assignments that draw on the use of textual evidence, research, and the incorporation of various points of view in order to form focused and thesis-driven arguments. Texts may include: Native Guard: Poems , Natasha Trethewey; Nox,  Anne Carson; Camera Lucida,  Roland Barthes; The Invention of Solitude,  Paul Auster; Being in Pictures , Joanne Leonard; The Principles of Uncertainty,  Maira Kalman; H Day , Renée French; One Hundred Demons , Lynda Barry; Are You My Mother? , Alison Bechdel; Funny Misshapen Body , Jeffrey Brown.

Course Type

First-Year Program: Writing Seminars (FIRST-UG)