This course will explore the manifold relations between the medium of photography and forms of literary narration throughout the 20th century. It will trace the ways in which the reflection on, and the use of, photographic images informs the work of seminal modernist and post-modernist writers like Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, André Breton, Günter Grass, Roland Barthes, Thomas Bernhard, W.G. Sebald, and Marcel Beyer, in order to address questions like the following: the relationship between narrative perspectives and photographic ways of seeing; the function of the photographic album as a model for literary childhood narratives; the textual negotiation of photography’s semiotic status as an “index” of reality; and the role of memory, history, and the photographic imagination in the context of fictional (auto-)biographies. All readings and discussions will be in English.