“Cinematic Strategies in XXth Century Narratives”

Essay collection, “Cinematic Strategies in XXth Century Narratives”

This collection of essays will examine the cinematic elements which characterise the XXth century novel in its aspects of style and narrative, so as to enlighten the less explored implications between literary and visual recreations of images. Russian director Eisenstein, for instance, pointed at the cinematic aspect of Joyce's writing by affirming that “what Joyce does in literature is quite near to what we do and even closer to what we have intentions of doing with the new cinematography”. Starting from early modernism, writers have famously been influenced by the new visual media of cinema, due to the innovative and revolutionary possibility to capture and reproduce movement. Such a recreation of movement and of realistic detail was enacted in several modernist novels and short-stories through the literary employment of cinematic techniques, such as spatial montage, panning, close-up and time-shifts. The collection will offer a multiple perspective on authors who have shown a direct interest in the art of cinema and especially on those who less overtly proved to have been influenced by cinematic techniques. We will welcome submissions from scholars from any field of literary studies, as the collection also aims at tracing an innovative comparative overview of literatures and of literary currents of the XXth century, as well as at providing a wide perspective on different methodological, critical and philosophical approaches.

Authors of particular interest include (but are not limited to):

Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, Samuel Beckett, Doris Lessing, Elizabeth Bowen, William Faulkner, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, Vladimir Nabokov Nadine Gordimer, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein, Marcel Proust, André Gide, Albert Camus, Jean Genet, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Günter Grass, Robert Musil, Ingeborg Bachmann, Alfred Döblin, Hermann Broch, Italo Svevo, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Carlo Cassola, Luigi Meneghello, Umberto Saba, Cesare Pavese, Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Related topics include (but are not limited to):

- Cinematic recreations of movement, sensory impressions, physical descriptions, spatial settings,  landscapes and urban scenes in narrative.

- Juxtaposition/interpenetration of literary and cinematic devices.

- analogical montage and narrative techniques.

- realism vs. metaphorical language.

- recreations of visual imagination in terms of cinema devices.

- magnified descriptions through the use of close-up.

- space and place recreations through the use of cinematic panning.

- subjective and objective point of view.

- cinema and stream of consciousness.

- simultaneity and time-space shifts.

Please send a 500-word abstract as a word-attachment, together with a brief bio-bibliographical note, by 15 July 2009, to Dr Teresa Prudente and Dr Federico Sabatini, Department of Comparative Literature, Faculty of Humanities, University of Turin, Via San Ottavio, 10123, Turin, Italy. Email: teresa.prudente@unito.it ; federico.sabatini@yahoo.com.

Completed essays, of no more than 6000 words, must be submitted before 30 October, in order for publication to take place in early 2010. Please note that acceptance of an abstract does not guarantee selection of the final essay.