Vision, thoughts, desire : photographic objects in Russian metafiction
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- My dissertation, "Vision, Thoughts, Desire: Photographic Objects in Russian Metafiction, " explores the metaphors of photographic devices, photographic objects, and the pre-photographic desire to see the world truthfully, all as essential elements of metafiction in Russia. After photography was invented in 1839, physiological sketches were often compared to it by critics and writers, who considered its mechanical reproduction devoid of artistic quality. I argue that some writers realized that photography, in fact, gave people new methods to think and write about an invisible area of human activities: the artist's subjective perception of reality. The mechanical structure of photographic cameras, consisting of the camera obscura, a light-collecting box, and light-revealing walls, plates, or films, presented a way to conceptualize how light is collected and visualized as images, not only in cameras but also in human perception. I show that the photographic technology of their era prompted Nikolai Gogol, Andrei Bely, and Vladimir Nabokov to rethink how their own vision, thoughts, and desires were materialized in their literary works, thus allowing us to see their works as metafiction. My dissertation aims to reinterpret the affinity between photography and literature. Every photograph, besides its main object, truthfully records the history of how its representation was created: the approximate exposure time, the focal length, and the photographer's framing, staging, and editing. These meta-data become more apparent when a photograph distorts its object, because that lets a viewer recognize its artificiality. Through this allegory, my dissertation searches for the meta-data of "vision, thoughts, and desire." I explore how Gogol, Bely, and Nabokov, writing in the age of photography, develop self-reflexive narrative techniques based on the deceptions permitted by contemporary photographic mechanisms. I analyze the development of self-reflexivity in both fiction and photography in the context of the expectations of truthful representation and the technological deficiencies that prevent the fulfillment of this desire.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2023; ©2023 |
| Publication date | 2023; 2023 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Jung, Byungsam |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Greenleaf, Monika, 1952- |
| Degree supervisor | Safran, Gabriella, 1967- |
| Thesis advisor | Greenleaf, Monika, 1952- |
| Thesis advisor | Safran, Gabriella, 1967- |
| Thesis advisor | Fleĭshman, Lazar |
| Thesis advisor | Ilchuk, Yuliya |
| Degree committee member | Fleĭshman, Lazar |
| Degree committee member | Ilchuk, Yuliya |
| Associated with | Stanford University, School of Humanities and Sciences |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Byungsam Jung. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2023. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/rf067bq9643 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2023 by Byungsam Jung
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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