30125 - Comparative Literatures (LM)

Course contents

Imaginary Pictures: literature and painting between Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries

  As Roland Barthes has put it, in the Nineteenth century the novel is haunted by “the model of painting” that interposes itself between literary representation and reality: to speak about “the real”, the writer must first of all transform it in a painted object by an opening ritual, Barthes writes in S/Z. Hence, the frequent references to classical painting that we encounter in the texts of the literary realism (characters defined as portraits by Rembrandt or Raffaello, sceneries equated to some landscape by Claude Lorrain....). But what do become of this “model” between the end of the Nineteenth and the beginning of the Twentieth centuries, when pictorial representation undergoes radical changes, leaving behind the figurative and mimetic imperative which had characterized it ever since its origins? The course intends to discuss some of these problematic issues, taking a specific literary phenomenon as a starting point: the construction of the narrative around an imaginary picture, focusing on its genesis, the aesthetics which supports it, the doubts and the attempts which accompany its development and sometimes announce its failure. These invisible pictures, only made out of words, become mirrors of the literary texts and at the same time point to the complex relationships between the linguistic and the visual in the age of modernity.

Readings/Bibliography

Literary texts

ٕ► H. de Balzac, Il capolavoro sconosciuto, Milano, Rizzoli

► H.James, Il bugiardo, Roma, Giulio Perrone

► E. Zola, L'opera, Milano, Garzanti

► V. Woolf, Al faro, Milano, Feltrinelli

 Critical texts

► L. Marin, “Mimesi e discrizione” e “La cornice della rappresentazione”, in Id, Della rappresentazione, Roma, Meltemi, rispettivamente pp. 118-138 e pp. 196-221

► M. Merleau-Ponty, “Il dubbio di Cezanne”, in L. Corrain (a cura di), Semiotiche della pittura, Roma, Meltemi, pp. 63-73

► W.T. Mitchell, Pictorial turn. Saggi di cultura visuale, Palermo, :due punti edizioni

► S. Kern, Il tempo e lo spazio. La percezione del mondo tra Otto e Novecento, Bologna, il Mulino

Students not attending classes, will be also requested to read the chapters XXV, XXVI and XXVII  of La storia dell'arte raccontata da E.H. Gombrich, Torino, Einaudi (o Leonardo Arte)

Assessment methods

Oral examination based on the list of recommended readings.

Teaching tools

Office hours

See the website of Donata Meneghelli