Interdisciplinary Arts 0276 - Photography, Facts, and Fictio

This is a research course for intellectuals who are artists and artists who are intellectuals. The course has two goals: (First) To investigate life in the U.S., 1890-1910, an era whose inequities and injustices, inventions and ambitions, panics and disasters eerily resemble our own. Students will sift through collections of archival photographs and an array of primary and secondary written documents to carry out their investigations. Photographs will come from on-line, archival collections; newspapers and novels published during the era will serve as primary written sources. (Second) To teach students how to discover and then use visual and written documents to build image/text narratives that, like documentary films, tell true stories about a tumultuous era that gave birth to what now passes for modern life. To achieve both goals will require intensive primary and secondary source research as well as immersion in large collections of archival photographs. Students who can understand visual documents as if they were written and written documents as if they were visual will find this course most rewarding.

Culture, Humanities, and Languages Multiple Cultural Perspectives Independent Work In this course, students are expected to spend at least eight to twelve hours a week of preparation and work outside of class time. This time includes reading, writing, on-line archival research.