ASRC 4503

Picturing the U.S. Slave Narrative

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2014-2015.

Before the advent of technologies like Facebook and Twitter, nineteenth-century viewers used new visual technologies-like collectible card-photographs and illustrated newspapers-to share information or publically debate social problems. In an effort to garner support for slavery's abolition, U.S. anti-slavery activists embraced "illustrations," "scenes," and "pictures," as key rhetorical tools, using them to provide "ocular proof" of slavery's horrors and abolition's necessity. Via hands-on interaction with nineteenth-century images, and classroom study of slave narratives, illustrated newspapers, and photo-texts, we will pinpoint how visual images transformed not only the nineteenth-century slave narrative, but also its many literary after-lives. By reading nineteenth-century visual culture against more contemporary representations of slavery like Toni Morrison's 1988 novel Beloved, Kyle Baker's 2005 graphic novel, Nat Turner, and Steve McQueen's 2014 Academy-Award Winning film Twelve Years a Slave, we'll revise how we define a key genre in American literary studies.

When Offered Spring.

Distribution Category (LA-AS)

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