Victorian Lit Photography

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

"The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph." - Walter Benjamin Almost 200 years before iPhones and the Internet, the innovation that first recorded, preserved, and produced visual images for the masses – i.e. photography as we recognize it today – imploded the boundaries of art, ethics, colonialism, expedition, technology, and science in its 1839 induction into framing – and exposing - everyday realism. The several surprising and fascinating effects of the camera’s lens to read both magical and truthful effects of the pictures it “took” provide a stimulating focus through which to read Victorian realism in the era’s literature. The camera elevated the authority in perceiving and reading criminal evidence, while it also promised that nostalgic impressions might be kept for posterity – no mean feat in the age of Change. The photograph slyly fought the painting in its greater affordability to purchase and copy. Photographs were portable in a variety of ways, signifying the importance of traveling from place to place and transforming the meaning and perception of Time as well as the relation between creating the image and reading the image. Photography gave a new meaning to individualism, suggesting the power of the visualized “type” to shape perception and perform identity – and even to mislead the former and misread the latter. Photography, in short, pumped up a faith in realism not only in its adamant poses of actuality, but also in the questions it raised about paying attention and disturbing the parameters, focus, clarity, and depth of what we see. The camera zoomed in and out as a machine that could equally enchant and mesmerize, exciting human knowledge, imagination and terror focused on such realities (pretended and actual) as Victorian landscapes, work, interiors and secrets, wars, class and gender dynamics. The course participants will consider these and more varied functions of early photography in light of Victorian literature’s awareness of modes and effects of seeing. Our main texts will be the novels: Villette (C. Brontë), Jude the Obscure (T. Hardy), Picture of Dorian Grey (O. Wilde), and To the Lighthouse (V. Woolf). Leadership in class presentation, two short papers (one a visual narrative using your camera phones) and one final research paper are required.