Textual Exposures: Photography in Twentieth-Century Spanish American Narrative Fiction: Latin American & Caribbean Studies , cartea 11

This book examines how twentieth-century Spanish American literature has registered photography's powers and limitations and the creative ways in which writers of this region of the Americas have elaborated the conventions and assumptions of this medium in fictional form. Providing a study of literary criticism, the author also shows how texts critically reflect upon the media environment in which they were created. Russek examines how other visual technologies that have been historically and aesthetically linked to the photographic medium, such as the x-ray, cinema, illustrated journalism, and television, inform the works of some of the most important writers in Latin America. Methodologically, the close readings of the texts center on the figure of ekphrasis (defined as the verbal representation of a visual representation). The book is concerned with the thematic, symbolic, structural, and cultural imprints photography leaves in narrative texts. The author relies on an immanent approach, reading the selected texts according to their own specificities and making the relevant thematic and structural connections between them, drawing from a variety of sources in the fields of literary criticism and theory and history of photography.