Disponible:*
Bibliothèque | Type de document | Numéro de cote topographique | Nombre d'enregistrements enfants | Emplacement | Statut | Réservations du document |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Recherche en cours... Science | Book | PN3352 .P42 S56 1998 | 1 | Stacks | Recherche en cours... Inconnu | Recherche en cours... Indisponible |
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Résumé
Résumé
For over a hundred years stories about photographs and photography have reflected the profound uncertainties and inconclusive endings of the modern world. For many writers, photography, supposedly the most realistic of the arts, turns out to be the most ambiguous. As Jane Rabb observes in her introduction, a number of the stories in this collection involve mysteries, perhaps because photography has a capacity for both documentary reality and moral and psychological ambiguity.
Many nineteenth-century writers represented here, including Thomas Hardy and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, helped make short fiction as respectable as the novel. Some of them were even serious photographers themselves. The twentieth century is arguably a golden age for both the short story and photography. This collection includes examples from a worldly group of writer--Eugène Ionesco, Julio Cortá¡zar, Michel Tournier, and Italo Calvino, as well as the Chinese writer Bing Xin and John Updike, Cynthia Ozick, and Raymond Carver. In this wide range of stories, varying from sentimental to obsessive, to sinister, to tragic and even fatal, the reader will find provocative examples of the confluence of the short story and photography, both once considered the bastard stepchildren of literature and art.
Critiques (1)
Critique de Choice
The raison d'etre of this excellent collection of stories by stylistically diverse, international writers is reflected in its unpretentious title. Rabb presents the 16 stories--by Kipling, Hardy, Mann, Bing Xin, Du Maurier, Calvino, Carver, and others--chronologically, suggesting an evolution of thinking about and creative treatment of the subject of photography in the short story. The progressive sophistication of the photographic equipment and processes described in many of these fictions heightens this impression. Some of these stories use photographs as critical pieces of evidence and instruments of plot development; some of the more interesting explore the motivations and beliefs of photographers and their subjects. Rabb's brief but extensively annotated introductory notes on the writers--reflecting her interest in their perceptions of photography--and Eugenia Parry's comparative comments in the foreword demonstrate a wish to engage the general reader as much as the student and scholar, who may already be familiar with the "parent text" to this volume, Literature & Photography Interactions, 1840-1990, also edited by Rabb (CH, Feb'96). These stories are evidence of the importance and irreplaceability of photographs in an ever more complex and storied world. All collections. C. Packard; University of Massachusetts at Amherst