Re-reading the short story as photograph, and photographic theory

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This project will study the interrelation between photography and the short story in the 1970s-80s, and will explore the idea of short-ness (or fractionality) in the context of photography (rather than against the novel), while also investigating how short stories from the time understood photography's status in visual culture.My proposed research will focus primarily on short fiction written or published in the US during the 1970s and 1980s. This was a moment in place and time that saw the decline of the mainstream photo magazine (with Life Magazine ceasing its weekly publication in 1972), alongside the proliferation of the literary magazine (the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses was formed in 1967). I am specifically interested in how photography is analogised in literature during this period, as well as how literature comments upon photography when the photograph itself no longer constitutes a spectacular appearance; when photographs have started to lose their purchase on the public's attention. The wider impact of this project will be a fuller and more nuanced consideration of the longer-standing dynamic relationship between photography and the short story, and the ways in which the two forms continue to define and influence one another.Building on the works of visual theorists including Kaja Silverman, Hito Steyerl, and George Baker, this interdisciplinary project will afford an approach to the short story that is rooted in photographic theory, as a way to understand how storytelling responded when the status of photographs wavered at the cusp of the digital era. Further, this project will argue that short stories from the 1970s and 80s were not only dealing in images, they were actively theorising what photography meant in the image-world.Research questions:1. How did short stories theorise the meaning of photography in the 1970s-80s?; What was the short story's relationship to photography as the latter's cultural status shifted?2. How did 1970s-80s short stories reconceptualise the relationship between external photographic images, and internal image-making (memories, dreams, preconceptions, imagination)?3. Can the modern short story be read as photographic theory in and of itself?4. Does a cross-discipline approach to photography and the short story more fully illuminate both?; Does photographic theory describe what the modern short story is; and do short stories from the 1970s-80s further explicate what photography meant in the predawn of the digital age?