Disappearance, photography and the phantomatic in contemporary French and Italian literatures

Principal investigator: Mag. Dr. Jutta Fortin
Duration: 01.03.2010–30.09.2017
Funding: FWF / Elise-Richter-Programm
Granted sum: EUR 301.411,95

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The motif of disappearance has haunted French and Italian literary narrative of the last three decades. Contemporary writers have been preoccupied, sometimes near-obsessively, with spectral figures, whose textual (and often also photographic) presence paradoxically points to the absence of that which these figures refer to, and simultaneously to these figures’ own power to re-emerge, to embed themselves in literary or photographic matter, and thus to survive that which has disappeared. Based on substantial previous research on a corpus of French literary texts, this project posits that in French and Italian literatures, the ghost device, often in association with photography, can be referred to traumatising historical events or individual life situations. In seeking to shed light on this phenomenon, the project proposes three distinct, but related lines of inquiry.

The first will study the phantomatic as a literary mode (as opposed to the thematic and allegorical modes) in its relation to individual and historical trauma by using André Green’s psychoanalytical concept of the “dead mother” (a depressed mother who is alive in reality, but who is dead according to the child’s psychic reality). It hypothesises that the literary manifestation of the maternal imago associated with the “dead mother” complex serves to reflect, and respond to, interiorised disappearance, inferiority and guilt.

The second line of inquiry will examine the phantomatic as it relates to the hidden presence of one text in another by having recourse to theories of intertextuality. I am especially interested in analysing the phantomatic textual presence, in a given literary text or oeuvre, of such narratives as myths, fairy tales and biblical fragments, hypothesising that these texts, because they are particularly anchored within a specific culture, are particularly apt to haunt, or “occupy”, other texts whilst functioning as collective transi­tional objects.

The third line of inquiry will relate the phantomatic to photography, studying references to photos in praesentia and in absentia, to real and fictive photographers, and to the processes at work in analogue and digital photography. It this case, the phantomatic will be approached as a sign of life lying dormant, which the photographic image can resuscitate, hypothesising that the photo, in a manner reminiscent of the intertextual fragment, has the capacity to produce a whole series of pictures, to “irradiate” an entire artistic work, and to serve as a connector between that which is present and that which has disappeared.