Textual Exposures
Subtitle: Photography in Twentieth Century Latin American Narrative Fiction
Publisher: University of Calgary Press
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 240
ISBN-13: 9781552387832
Subjects: American fiction, history and criticism, 20th century; Art in literature
Description: This book examines how twentieth-century Spanish American literature has registered photography's powers and limitations, and the creative ways in which writers of this region of the Americas have elaborated in fictional form the conventions and assumptions of this medium. While the book is essentially a study of literary criticism, it also aims to show how texts critically reflect upon the media environment in which they were created. The writings analysed enter a dialogic relation with visual technologies such as the x-ray, cinema, illustrated journalism, and television. The study examines how these technologies, historically and aesthetically linked to the photographic medium, inform the works of some of the most important writers in Latin America. Methodologically, the close readings of the texts centre on the figure of ekphrasis (defined as the verbal representation of a visual representation). The book is concerned with the thematic, symbolic, structural and cultural imprints photography leaves in narrative texts.