Zawacki, Andrew
W 9:10 AM
Park Hall 0251
This course will engage the braid of two kinds of writing. The first is that done with, and in, language: the poem, the essay, the letter, the tale, trace or mark or character. The other, wordless, is photography—literally, “light-writing.” Half our seminar each week will investigate the crossover of literary writing and photography, as manifested in criticism (by Judith Butler and Susan Sontag) and especially in practice, as exemplified by Hélène Cixous, Bertolt Brecht, Julio Cortázar, Sophie Calle, and Dominique Fourcade. One week we will join another class to meet poet Mai Der Vang on Zoom. In addition, we will examine three films—by Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, and Michelangelo Antonioni—that have photography at their center. The second half of each meeting will be a creative workshop in which students critique one another’s experiments in combining photography with text. We will spend four sessions at the Georgia Museum of Art, working with their photography holdings and writing ekphrastic poems.