Date of Award

Summer 8-2012

Degree Type

Masters Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

English

Committee Chair

Monika Gehlawat

Committee Chair Department

English

Committee Member 2

Charles Sumner

Committee Member 2 Department

English

Committee Member 3

Martina Sciolino

Committee Member 3 Department

English

Abstract

Americans today have come to remember the unrest of the 1960s through the many shocking photographic images that emerged during that time. Images of assassinations, war, murders, and social upheaval have come to characterize this decade as particularly (perhaps perversely) photogenic. Further, these images have revealed the photographic medium as uniquely suited for confirming a violent reality that, at the time, seemed incomprehensible to an increasingly disillusioned public. In this discussion I seek to develop an understanding of photography as a theoretical process that can illuminate how we represent violent subject matter. In doing so, I apply these concepts to the New Journalism of the 1960s, which can be viewed as texts that grapple with the same types of social turbulence depicted in the many indelible images that have come to characterize this time period.

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