Literature and Photography (taught in Russian)

Dates: February 3 - March 3, 2026
Day/Time: Tuesday 10:10 AM - 1:10 PM EST
Level: 300
Certificate: None 
Instructor: Larissa Muravieva, Smolny Beyond Borders
Language of Instruction: Russian 

Since its invention in the nineteenth century, photography has become an integral part of literary imagination and a powerful tool for reflecting on the nature of images, memory, and representation. This course explores the complex and layered relationship between literature and photography—ranging from ekphrasis to reproduction, from illustration to transmedial and digital connections between photographic images and text. Photography reorganizes the literary text in new ways: it transforms the rhetoric of ekphrasis, redefines literature’s relationship to the real, and complicates the boundary between document and fiction. Despite its media-specific characteristics, photography often acquires a narrative function, becoming a means of storytelling that activates both memory and imagination. We will examine how engagement with this medium affects writing, reading, and editorial practices. The course offers a historical and theoretical overview of the interactions between literature and photography, with particular attention to issues of representation, reproduction, testimony, documentation, and memory. We will read texts by Philippe Ortel, Hervé Guibert, Roland Barthes, André Rouillé, Susan Sontag, Sophie Calle, Magali Nachtergael. Special emphasis will be placed on the interplay between photography and autobiography in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—two practices that compete for the authority to preserve personal experience.

Credits: 1 US / 2 ECTS

Guidelines for the Statement of Interest

Please prepare a reflective statement explaining your interest in the Smolny Beyond Borders online course. Upload the file with a title in Latin alphabet using the following format: yourLastnameFirstname_course title. The clarity and substance of your statement will play an important role in our selection process. Describe your motivations and goals for taking this course succinctly yet thoughtfully. Please write your statement in the course’s language of instruction.