Since its invention in the nineteenth century, photography has become an inseparable part of literary imagination and a key medium through which writers explore the nature of representation. This course examines the multilayered relations between literature and photography — from ekphrasis to reproduction, from illustration to image-making, and from intermedial practices to the convergence of text and image in a digital environment. Photography shapes literary writing in multiple ways: it transforms the rhetoric of ekphrasis, reframes literature’s engagement with reality, and unsettles the boundaries between document and fiction. Photographs often assume a narrative role, acting as catalysts for storytelling and activating both memory and imagination. At the same time, photography functions as a condition of automedial subject formation, mediating experience even before it crystallizes into language. We will explore how interaction with the photographic medium affects writing and reading practices, and how it contributes to the emergence of new modes of subjectivity.
The course offers a historical and theoretical overview of literary–photographic relations, with sustained attention to questions of representation, testimony, documentation, and memory. Particular focus will be devoted to the interplay between photography and autobiography in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries — two practices that have long competed for the authority to preserve and transmit personal experience.