Description
Book SynopsisSince cinema is a composite language, describing a movie is a complex challenge for critics and writers, and greatly differs from the ancient and successful genre of the ekphrasis, the literary description of a visual work of art. Imaginary Films in Literature deals with a specific and significant case within this broad category: the description of imaginary, non-existent movies – a practice that is more widespread than one might expect, especially in North American postmodern fiction. Along with theoretical contributions, the book includes the analyses of some case studies focusing on the borders between the visual and the literary, intermedial practices of hybridization, the limits of representation, and other related notions such as “memory”, “fragmentation”, “desire”, “genre”, “authorship”, and “censorship”.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction Massimo Fusillo The Aesthetics of Imaginary Films Notes Toward a Theory of Cinematic “Ekphrasis” James A. W. Heffernan The Killing Vision: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest Stefano Ercolino Hybridizations “Writing The Making Of”: A New Literary Genre? Jan Baetens “A Film Run in Installments”: Memory and Cinema in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder Vincenzo Maggitti Towards Other Worlds, Towards Other Meanings: Screenplays on the Edge of the Plot Clotilde Bertoni Paul Auster, Hector Mann and The Book of Illusions Anna Scannavini Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí: Cinema, Theatre, Television and the Creative Force of the Word Federica Ivaldi Failed Cinema “Quo Vadis – Kino?” Kurt Pinthus and the Theoretical Debate on the Birth of Cinema in Germany Luca Zenobi The Outer Life of Martin Frost, or Never Make an Imaginary Film Silvia Albertazzi On Conceiving (and Sometimes Not Succeeding in Making) a Film Giulio Iacoli The Politics of Imaginary Films The “Quasi-Truth”. Literature and Cinema in Starnone and Piccolo Gianluigi Simonetti Breakfast at the Prater. Christopher Isherwood, His Women and Men Gian Piero Piretto The Technological Imagery Alpdrücken and the Spectrum of Power in Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon Mirko Lino Pattern Recognition: The “Postcinema” Seen by William Gibson Simone Arcagni Bibliography Index
