Disappearance, photography and the phantomatic

The motif of disappearance has haunted French and Italian literary narrative of the last three decades. Contemporary writers have been preoccupied, sometimes near-obsessively, with spectral figures, whose textual (and often also photographic) presence paradoxically points to the absence of that which these figures refer to, and simultaneously to these figures` own power to re-emerge, to embed themselves in literary or photographic matter, and thus to survive that which has disappeared. Based on substantial previous research on a corpus of French literary texts, this project posits that in French and Italian literatures, the ghost device, often in asso-ciation with photography, can be referred to traumatising historical events or individual life situations. In seeking to shed light on this phenomenon, the project proposes three distinct, but related lines of inquiry. The first will study the phantomatic as a literary mode (as opposed to the thematic and allegorical modes) in its relation to individual and historical trauma by using André Green`s psychoanalytical concept of the "dead mother" (a depressed mother who is alive in reality, but who is dead according to the child`s psychic reality). It hypothesises that the literary mani-festation of the maternal imago associated with the "dead mother" complex serves to reflect, and respond to, interiorised disappearance, inferiority and guilt. The second line of inquiry will examine the phantomatic as it relates to the hidden presence of one text in another by having recourse to theories of intertextuality. I am especially interested in analysing the phantomatic textual presence, in a given literary text or oeuvre, of such narratives as myths, fairy tales and biblical fragments, hypothesising that these texts, because they are particularly anchored within a specific culture, are particularly apt to haunt, or "occupy", other texts whilst functioning as collective transitional objects. The third line of inquiry will relate the phantomatic to photography, studying references to photos in praesentia and in absentia, to real and fictive photographers, and to the processes at work in analogue and digital photography. It this case, the phantomatic will be approached as a sign of life lying dormant, which the photographic image can resuscitate, hypothesising that the photo, in a manner reminiscent of the intertextual fragment, has the capacity to produce a whole series of pictures, to "irradiate" an entire artistic work, and to serve as a connector between that which is present and that which has disappeared.

The motif of disappearance has haunted French and Italian literary narrative of the last four decades. Contemporary writers have been preoccupied, sometimes near-obsessively, with spectral figures. Based on substantial previous research on a corpus of French literary texts, this project posits that the ghost device, often in association with photography, can be referred to traumatic historical events or individual life situations. Most often, in fact, collective and private traumas are conjunctly implied by a single text or oeuvre. The project is based on the idea of the phantomatic as a literary mode, as opposed to the thematic and allegorical modes. Indeed, the project is interested in narrative texts in which the experience of collective or private loss and abandonment is addressed not directly, but indirectly (by referring to other texts, images, or films); and it examines how a specific experience occupies a given oeuvre, rather than being related by a single text centred on it thematically. The project uses André Greens psychoanalytical concept of the dead mother as both a thematic and a methodological framework. The dead mother is a physically present, but emotionally absent, mother, who fails to respond to her child, eventually making the child him- or herself feel as good as dead. Greens concept refers to the psychic construction of a small child who feels suddenly and mysteriously abandoned by his or her mother, after the latter has fallen into a depression, following the unexpected death of another child or baby. According to the surviving childs psychic reality, his or her mother is brutally transformed into a cold, quasi-inanimate figure. On the one hand, then, the project limits the corpus of texts to literary narrative dealing phantomatically with the subjects relationship to the mother, the ambivalent role of the mother, or/and the significance of mothering. On the other hand, while also having recourse to theories of intertextuality, intersemiotics, and photography, the project refers to Greens theory of the dead mother-complex, so as to analyse the literary subjects diffuse sense of emptiness, inferiority and guilt; as well as the imagery of motherhood or/and childbirth, used in the texts to refer to involuntary separation or death. The results of the project will be useful to literary and cultural criticism both for the interest of its topics and for theoretical and methodological reasons. But the relevance of the project goes well beyond the particularities of France and Italy, or of contemporary Romance literatures and media. The traumas of History, as well as the private trauma of losing ones mothers love, will most probably continue to raise questions in future. Yet the very acts of writing and of reading critically matter infinitely not only for a collective memorisation of History, but for a constructive understanding of human nature.