Phototextuality and the uses of literature in the modernist period 3

18 Maio 2018, 10:00 • Ângela Fernandes

The first part of the session is dedicated to the presentation and discussion of a specific case of word-image interaction in the modernist period (short stories in illustrated magazines during the modernist period in Italy), to be analysed also on the basis of some of the concepts proposed by Mitchell and Sillars. The second part of the session is dedicated to the opening chapter of Michael North, Camera Works. Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word (Oxford University Press, 2005). The topics for discussion include the status of photography as “first modern art”, the multiple associations between photography and writing, in particular with regard to the ideal of a “transparent” language of nature, the paradoxical effects of the invention of the camera on the confidence in human perception, and the omnipresence of photography as a “technical, social and aesthetic context” for modernist art.