FYS 50 A Certain Slant of Light: Interpreting the Short, the Small & the Everyday
Photographs, short stories, poems, feuilletons, found objects, epigrams, anecdotes, jokes. These are the genres of the short, the small, the compact, the lyrical, the enigmatic and the obvious, but they are no less complex for all of that. Over the course of the semester we will be looking at photographs and reading short stories (along with a number of related genres) in an effort to develop a variety of interpretive strategies for understanding what is in front of us--often hiding in plain sight, sometimes opaque, wayward and wildly eccentric. We will pay particular attention to writers and photographers who focus on small moments, the everyday--"a certain slant of light"--which often lead to large epiphanies! Writers and photographers include Bresson, Breton, Borges, Poe, Ray, Dickinson, Carver, Chekhov, Munro, Joyce, Weston, and Nabokov--along with some fellow travelers like Joseph Cornell. Open only to first-year frosh.