| Photography has had significant influences on twentieth-century Italian literature since the end of World War II, yet academic boundaries have kept photography and literature largely separate. This separation is largely due to photography's ubiquity and its ambiguous status as a cultural form, which have biased critics against it. But many writers over the past half-century have seen no such barrier, finding in photography a source of inspiration and ideas about issues of central importance to literature. This dissertation seeks to explore the important ways in which Italian writers in the period 1945--2000 have made use of photography. These include collaborative projects with photographers photo-texts written representations of "photographic" ways of seeing and the use of photographs and photographic techniques as themes, metaphors, or motifs in literary works. Using literary, photographic, visual, and cultural theory, the dissertation looks at photography as a cultural phenomenon, relating its multiple roles in Italian society to the ways in which Elio Vittorini, Cesare Zavattini, Italo Calvino, Lalla Romano, Giulia Niccolai, Andrea De Carlo, Gianni Celati, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Daniele Del Giudice, and Antonio Tabucchi have responded to and used photography in their works. Concentrating on prose fiction, it argues that these writers use photography to tackle key questions that also regard writing: the boundaries between truth and fiction, the question of identity, our relation to memory and to death, the impossibility or otherwise of narration, and the role of the "author." It shows that many of Italy's most interesting and original writers of the second half of the last century were both intensely interested in and strongly influenced by photography. In analyzing this relation, the dissertation addresses fundamental questions about visual and verbal representations, their function and effect, ethics and aesthetics. |
