%0 Journal Article
%T Photos, Facts and Fiction: Literary Texts and Mechanical Representation
%J -
%D 2018
%R http://dx.doi.org/10.13135/2281-6658/3110
%X As a mechanical mode of representation, both iconic and indexical, photography has a testimonial and documentary power matched only by film and audio recordings. As Roland Barthes put it, ¡°contrary to [language-based] imitations, in Photography, I can never deny that the thing has been there.¡± Yet ¡°the thing¡± can be faked, the recording can be manipulated, and the testimonial value of photos can be subverted in many ways. In this article, I examine the various roles that photos can play when connected to literary texts or to graphic novels. Several cases will be discussed: photos as factual documents that complement language in nonfictional literary texts such as autobiographies; deceptive use of photos in fictional texts that try to pass as or imitate factual texts (Wolfgang¡¯s Hildesheimer¡¯s Marbot); non-deceptive use of photos to break the frame of a fictionalized storyworld and assert the real-world reference of the text (Art Spiegelman¡¯s Maus); ambiguous use of photos in texts that hover between the factual and the fictional (W.G. Sebald¡¯s The Emigrants); and the strange case of Orhan Pamuk¡¯s Museum of Innocence, where photos as collector¡¯s items are exhibited in a real-world museum that both refers to the text and remains independent of it, thereby documenting both the fictional and the real world
%U http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/COSMO/article/view/3110