Instructor: Bojan Srbinovski

Campus mail: English Department, 250 Goldwin Smith

Email: bbs79@cornell.edu

Through the camera people become customers or tourists of reality, the American critic Susan Sontag once remarked. Why do we feel the need to capture the suffering of others in the form of a photograph, when we know an image cannot do justice to the violence that we see? And why does the language of photography–like that of flashbacks–insert itself into the writing of traumatic testimony? Drawing on court cases, crime reports, medical histories, and news stories from the last thirty years, we will interrogate the command that photography and trauma have come to have of the truth.