our 2017-2018 seminar will focus on the tension, misrepresentation, distortion or correspondence that may exist between text and images. The seductive power (soft power) of images as well as their emotional pull, their evocative power, both of which introduce a complex relationship with the text will be studied. Various forms of life writing will be examined, from the most recent forms, such as writers’ blogs (Ruth Ozeki), culinary memoirs and graphic memoirs, to nineteenth and twentieth century instances of life writing where images, from engravings to photographs to clippings and watercolors play a crucial role—slave narratives, family memoirs including photographs, scrapbooks, painters’ autobiographies and so on.

The role played by photographs in identity quests (filiation, rejection) and postmemory in family memoirs; The role played by images in the construction of the self

Books and articles we read and presented to the group:

_Adams, Timothy Dow. Light Writing and Life Writing, Photography in Autobiography, Chapel Hill and London: U of North Carolina P, 2000.
_Barthes, Roland, 1980. La Chambre claire : Note sur la photographie. Paris: Seuil.
—, 1981. Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang (présentation by Claire Bazin)

Gingell, Susan and Wendy Roy. 2012. Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond: Interfaces of the Oral, Written, and Visual. Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press (presentation by Nathalie Saudo)
_Mitchell, W. J. T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

— -. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. presentation by Valérie Baisnée
Rak Julie and Anna Poletti, ed. Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online presentation by Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni,
_Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. 2002. Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance. University of Michigan Press. presentation by Corinne Bigot