Enlightening Encounters: Photography in Italian Literature. Eds. Giorgia Alù and Nancy Pedri. University of Toronto Press, 2015.

Enlightening Encounters: Photography in Italian Literature is a co-edited collection of essays (with Dr. Giorgia Alù, University of Sydney) that begins to map the multifaceted and complex interaction of photography and writing as it is manifested in Italian literature.

Contributors to this volume have adopted diverse approaches (including historical, aesthetic, literary and linguistics approaches) to examine the way photography evokes, engages with or comments on Italian literary texts. They engage in timely issues surrounding photography and photo-text relations, such as the photographic image's indexicality and how it informs the tenets of literary realism, its potential to narrate a story and thus invent imaginary realities or stimulate imagination, photographic seeing and literacy as well as photography's relation to memory, time and place. In addition, broad questions of the verbal and photographic representation of identity, truth and reality repeatedly come to light throughout this volume. All the issues raised have been tackled with the aid of the critical thinking of photography theorists in Italy and abroad.

The collection is comprised of twelve articles. Enlightening Encounters is a unique collection of essays in that it is the first volume devoted to the study of photography in this national literature.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 1

Photo-Literary Encounters in Italy 3
GIORGIA ALÙ and NANCY PEDRI
University of Sydney, Australia
Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada

The Lure of Photography

1. Spectres of Photography: Photography, Literature, and the Social Sciences in Fin-de-siècle Italy 27
MARIA GRAZIA LOLLA, Harvard University, USA

2. Authoring Images: Italo Calvino, Gianni Celati, and Photography as Literary Art 51
PASQUALE VERDICCHIO, University of California at San Diego, USA

3. Fossati’s and Messori’s Vision of Landscape in Viaggio in un paesaggio terrestre 70
MARINA SPUNTA, University of Leicester, United Kingdom

Photography Structuring Narrative

4. The Fiction of Photography: Vittorio Imbriani’s Merope IV—Sogni e fantasie di Quattr’Asterischi (1867) 101
SARAH A. CAREY, Stanford University, USA

5. Narrated Photographs and the Collapse of Time and Space in Erri De Luca’s Non ora, non qui 122
NANCY PEDRI, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada

Narrated Photographs and Photographs Narrating

6. Photo-poems: Visual Impact Strategies and Photo-story in the Work of Mario Giacomelli and Luigi Crocenzi 141
MARCO ANDREANI, University of Parma, Italy

7. What the Writer Saw (and the Camera Didn’t): Antonio Tabucchi's Notturno Indiano and Daniele Del Giudice’s Lo Stadio di Wimbledon 169
DONATA PANIZZA, Rutgers University, USA

8. Photographs Illustrating and Photographs Telling: Exercises in Reading Lalla Romano and Elio Vittorini 191
EPIFANIO AJELLO, University of Salerno, Italy

Through the Lens

9. Narrative Scopophilia as Seen through the Lens of a Photographic Camera: Intersemiotic Translation and Voyeurism in Alberto Moravia’s L’uomo che guarda (1985) 217
MARIARITA MARTINO, University of Warwick, United Kingdom

10. Photography into the Limelight: Andrea De Carlo’s Treno di panna 233
SARAH PATRICIA HILL, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

11. Looking Through Coloured Shards: Words and Images in Ornela Vorpsi’s Works 254
GIORGIA ALÙ, University of Sydney, Australia

Writing with Light: Concluding Remarks 279
GIORGIA ALÙ and NANCY PEDRI
University of Sydney, Australia
Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada

Bibliography 285

List of Contributors 309

Index 313