PHOTOGRAPHY, LITERATURE AND MEMORY: INTERMEDIAL EXCHANGES IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH FICTION

By employing the lens of the most recent critical studies on intermediality, the present work aims at demonstrating how both photographs and verbal texts constitute structural elements in the development of the narrative structure and its signification. Depending on the way photos and literary texts are combined, they contextualise, explain or contradict each other on different levels of meaning. In particular, this work shows the relevance of the photo-textual practice for the exploration of issues of memory related to traumatic events, where images become fundamental traces of the past, and define one’s related perception of the present reality. This work focuses upon three contemporary intermedial novels, that share the narration of traumatic events, like the Holocaust and the terroristic attack of 9/11, by means of photo-textual narration: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2011) by Ransom Riggs, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2006) by Jonathan Safran Foer, and The Dark Room (2001) by Rachel Seiffert. In these hybrid texts, the interaction between photographs and verbal text reveals a general disruption and destabilisation of the narratives, that gives way to a multiplicity of interpretations. As members of the generations after the Holocaust, the literary authors had no direct experience of the events at the base of their novels, but find themselves facing the arduous challenge of grasping traumatic memories inherited and never completely elaborated by the first generation. As it will be argued, the combination of photographs and verbal texts, declined into different modalities of representation, becomes the most suitable literary instrument to evoke and capture memories of trauma and loss. In this context, the reader emerges as an active participant in the process of fiction-making, as the act of reading becomes a renewed act of witnessing.