Literature Supplement description

In this 6-week Samplings subject, which meets weekly until early October,, we read texts – chiefly poems and photographs -- that have come to seem “iconic” in American culture. We consider what that designation means [what is a icon for? what work does a “canon” do? what does it permit? what does it inhibit or prevent?], and we look at how certain texts become iconic or formative. Often, we recognize historical moments or movements, and a journalist or writer documents the moment; eventually the documentation seems so completely to represent [or to embody] the moment that we interpret the text formally in order to understand the historical or Ideological or psychological nuances of the moment. Some texts directly aspire to that representative status [and sometimes in the moment some technicians manipulate the reality they portray]; some artists create texts that overtly themselves as useful models to be made iconic.
Poems by Walt Whitman, Emma Lazarus, Robert Frost, Marilyn Chin, James Wendell Johnson, Howard Nemerov, others
Pictures and images by Eadweard Muybridge, James McNeill Whistler, Lewis Hine, Frederick Douglass, Alfred Stieglitz, Diane Arbus,* Margaret Bourke-White, Gordon Parks, Joe Rosenthal, Sally Mann, Carrie Mae Weems and others.
Film by Charlie Chaplin.

*Here’s a useful fact: The character and appearance of Bart Simpson were based on Diane Arbus’ picture “Child with toy hand grenade in Central Park, NYC, 1962.”