The Power and Politics of Description: Ethnography, Documentary and Modernist Literature

Semester: Spring 2025; Cross-Listed with the Department of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity, and the Department of English Language and Literature

“What we call ‘descriptions’ are instruments for particular uses. Think of a machine-drawing, a cross-section, an elevation with measurements, which an engineer has before him. Thinking of a description as a word-picture of the facts has something misleading about it: one tends to think only such pictures as hang on our walls.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations


“Light is sharply directed on one spot, leaving not only the greater part in darkness but also denying by implication that the great unlighted field exists.”

— Zora Neale Hurston, “Seeing the World As It Is,” Dust Tracks on a Road.


The work of description—the way that writers convey the characteristic features and significant details of people and places in language—can contain and confirm biases and anchor stale tropes of identity, but can also refuse, exceed, play with, and subverting readerly

expectations. Descriptions made for the purposes of political consciousness-raising, journalistic documenting, or narrative storytelling bring into sharp relief senses of ourselves in relation to perceptions of “otherness” along lines of place, race, class, and gender. In this class, we will read literary and photographic works by authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, James Agee and Walker Evans and focus on how they experiment with methodologies of description and representation of people borrowed from

anthropology, photography, and documentary journalism, as well as literary techniques like stream-of-consciousness narration and first-personal disclosure—to productively account for the limitations of their individual perspectives and authorial voices as a narrative and poetic tool. Particular attention will be paid to how gender and sexuality, race and racialization, and embodiment impact these accounts of social worlds, relations, and cultures, and person.


Students will be able to:

Use tools of close literary analysis to attend to the formal features of novels, documentary accounts, and works of poetry in order to parse how they employ description as a tactic for portraying a world.

Identify how particular literary forms and projects such as the stream of consciousness novel, the documentary, the work song, the blues, traditions of representing dialect, and structures of analogy, are linked with the ethnographic.

Articulate and marshal textual evidence to support original arguments about the course texts. Take risks, experiment, and pose creative and critical questions about course texts in collaborative and collegial dialogue—written and spoken—with peers.