LIT 342L
Studies in American Literature
W 6-8:45; Rm E306
Professor Sarah Blackwood
Office Hours: M 12:15-2:15
Rm. 1504, 41 Park Row
sblackwood@pace.edu
American Literature and Visual Culture
Course description: North by Northwest. The Campbell soup can. Billboards. Frank Lloyd Wright's
Guggenheim Museum. The artwork inside the Guggenheim museum. The sleek white case of your Apple
laptop. Mad Men and The Wire. Your digital photos. Your digital photos posted on Facebook. "Visual
culture" refers to the myriad visual artifacts and media that saturate our experience of the world, from film,
photography, and paintings to products, advertisement, interior design, and architecture. This course will
help you sharpen your critical eye through analysis of texts and images from the 19th century to the present,
with an emphasis on texts that attempt to come to terms with visual experience.
Our society of the spectacle has important roots in the 19th century, which experienced one of the
greatest visual revolutions in history, from the invention of photography to advances in the mechanical
reproduction of images (in newspapers, magazines, etc…); these innovations were sensitively explored by a
number of leading American writers. The relationship between literature and visual culture continued to be
both fruitful and vexed for 20th century writers and artists, who received their own challenges in the form of
film and television. This seminar will ask you to consider, among others, questions of aesthetic value, art and
beauty, the role of the artist, the invention of photography, advertising, celebrity, desire, surveillance, and
identity.
Required Texts
Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron-Mills
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (recommended)
Course Requirements:
(Note: By enrolling and remaining in this class, you have implicitly agreed to these responsibilities.)
Attendance is required. Because this class only meets once a week, any absence will affect your
participation grade negatively. I do not distinguish between "excused" and "unexcused" absences. If you
miss more than 2 classes, you will receive an F in participation. Please note that leaving halfway through
the class will count as an absence.
Announcements about assignments, changes in schedule, etc, will be made at the beginning of the class
meeting. If you are late, it is your responsibility to receive all notes and relevant information from your
classmates. Please check your Pace email account at least once a day for other announcements.
Read carefully and bring the text(s) we are discussing to class with you. You will not be able to successfully
complete this class without reading the assignments in a timely manner (in fact, it is one of the most
important things you can do to attain a good grade in the class.) There are some weeks with heavy or dense
reading; you are responsible for looking ahead and planning for this. Please note that if you attend class
without the text assigned for that day, you will be counted absent for that day.
Assignments are due at the beginning of class on the days assigned. If you anticipate that you may miss a
due date because of illness or a personal emergency, contact me before the assignment is due. Late
assignments will be penalized one third of a grade (for example, an A will slip to an A-, a B+ to a B, etc.) for
every calendar day past the due date. There are no exceptions to this policy.
A word on Participation and Discussion: You have a double responsibility to contribute your ideas—
however inchoate, however seemingly rudimentary—to our semester-long conversation. First, you owe your
classmates the chance to encounter other minds at work; second, you owe yourself the intellectual challenge
of participation. Articulating your ideas in discussion, precisely because it is often daunting, can incite leaps
forward in your education. Remember, the goal is never to "get it right" but to make it interesting.
Never stop yourself from sharing a thought because you think it's "wrong" or "out there"—from my
experience, the most fascinating insights are often those that students are most unsure of.
Thus it should be (but isn't quite) unnecessary to spell out the rules of respect for discussion. I expect
that you will listen to your peers as attentively as I listen to you. That means cell phones must be turned off
(not just silenced) throughout class. Any laptops open should be used exclusively for taking notes or reading
the assigned PDFs.
Course Evaluation
Pop Culture Analysis (3-5 pages)
Materialist Analysis (5-7 pages)
Final Paper (6-8 pages)
Participation, Blog Post, Informal Assignments
20%
25%
30%
25%
Other notes:
1) Work submitted that is not your own is considered plagiarism. This includes work copied from other
students, copied, bought or "cut and pasted" from the Internet, and work presented without appropriate
citation and referencing. If you submit plagiarized work, you will receive a failing grade for the assignment,
and possibly for the course. Plagiarism may also be grounds for academic dismissal from
the university. If you have any questions about what constitutes plagiarism, the Birnbaum library offers an
excellent resource page on the issue http://www.pace.edu/library/pages/instruct/plaig.html.
2) If you have a medical or learning disability you are entitled to assistance and accommodations through the
university. This assistance includes evaluating your medical documentation, conducting appropriate tests,
making recommendations for accommodation, and contacting your professors to arrange for the
recommended accommodations. You must, however, contact the Coordinator for Disabled Students (3461526) at the beginning of the semester to ensure that you receive these services. If you fail to do this, we
cannot make special accommodations for you.
3) I am always happy to discuss writing skills with students. This class, however, assumes basic proficiency
with writing and argumentation. If you are concerned about your writing, it is your responsibility to seek out
extra advice, either from me or from other resources. I strongly suggest utilizing the university Writing
Center, on the second floor the Birnbaum library. The Writing Center provides assistance with class
assignments, and also specific grammar-related questions. You can reach them at 346-1085, or online:
http://appserv.pace.edu/execute/page.cfm?doc_id=9381
WEEKLY SCHEDULE
9/8: No Class
Literature and Visual Culture: Ways of Seeing
9/15 Annie Dillard, "Seeing" (PDF); John Berger Ch. 1 "Ways of Seeing" (PDF)
9/22
Roland Barthes, "The Rhetoric of an Image" (PDF)
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (PDF)
Introduction, "Seeing a Different Visual World"
http://www.common-place.org/vol-07/no-03/intro/
One other article of your choice from Common Place 7.3
Still Life
9/29 Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills
Literature and Photography
10/6 MEET AT NYPL Prints and Photographs Room
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Daguerreotype" (PDF)
Walt Whitman, "Visit to Plumbe's Gallery" (PDF)
Jules Prown, "Mind in Matter" (PDF)
POP CULTURE ANALYSIS DUE
The Real Thing
10/13 Henry James, "The Real Thing" (PDF)
Jean Baudrillard, "Simulacra and Simulation" (PDF)
Ethnography of Manners
10/20 Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
10/27 Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
Guy Debord, "The Society of the Spectacle" (PDF)
John Berger, "Ways of Seeing", Chapter 3 (PDF)
MATERIALIST ANALSYSIS DUE
Exhibiting Identity
11/3 W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
11/10 W.E.B. DuBois, Exhibit of American Negroes (online)
Documenting | Art
11/17 from James Agee & Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (PDF)
11/24: NO CLASS HAPPY THANKSGIVING!
Real | Life
12/1 Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
12/8
Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
Assignments
Blog Post: You will sign up for one week during which to compose a blog post about the assigned
texts. The posts need to be up by Tuesday at 5 p.m. The posts should be at least one substantial
paragraph long, and should pose a critical question or offer an interpretation of a passage. You are
also required to COMMENT on at least FOUR blog posts over the course of the semester. Everyone
should read the post(s) and comments before coming to class on Wednesday evening. The blog is
accessible via Blackboard.
Pop Culture Analsysis (3-5 pages)
You will choose one essay from Common Place 7.3 to read. These essays are each on a particular
aspect of 19th century visual culture, namely:
--gender and visual representation in newspapers
--gender and political cartoons
--African Americans and political cartoons
--scrapbooks
--satire and political caricature
--presidential portraits
--images displayed within homes
--representations of Chinese labor
--urban panoramas
--portrayals of the West
--portrait prints
--reproduction of photographs in other media
Pick ONE of these essays, read it, and then brainstorm about how the issue(s) the essay addresses
are still relevant today. Your essay should then consist of: a substantial paragraph re-presenting and
summarizing the issue(s) raised regarding 19th century visual culture, an elegant
transition/connection between those issues and your contemporary example, and an analysis of your
contemporary example. You should think widely about your example: it may be drawn from
contemporary media (political caricatures of President Obama) or it may be drawn from your lived
life (what sorts of images decorate your family home? Can you connect those with the essay on the
pictures that hung in the Dickinson family home?)
Materialist Analysis (as long as it needs to be, but probably around 5-7 pages)
Return to the Prints and Photographs room at the NYPL on your own and select an object that
interested you from our class visit. Write an analysis of the object of your choice, following the
guidelines set forth by Jules Prown in the essay "Mind in Matter." More details will follow.
Final Essay (6-8 pages): Details will follow.