Sea Changes: Representations of Fluid Adolescences Through Literature and Cinema

by Sara Spanghero
Doctoral thesis
Date of Examination:2018-12-17
Date of issue:2019-09-20
Advisor:Prof. Dr. Brigitte Glaser
Referee:Prof. Dr. Roberta Gefter Wondrich
Referee:Dr. Florian Kappeler
Persistent Address: http://dx.doi.org/10.53846/goediss-7651

 

 

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Abstract

English

The research carried out in the present study comprises the media of literature and cinema, and it covers a timespan of about six decades, roughly starting from the beginning of the twentieth century. The two main foci of analysis are English literary Modernism, which developed in the 1920s, and the French nouvelle-vague cinema of the late 1950s and early 1960s. My corpus of primary works is composed by several texts and authors, yet special attention is dedicated to selected novels and short stories by Irish modernist James Joyce and to selected films by French director François Truffaut. By means of a comparative analysis of literary and cinematic texts, I identify the category of fluid anti-developmental narratives. This category is composed by narrative works whose protagonists are adolescents or young adults who are unable (or unwilling) to develop into what is commonly considered as mature adulthood, thus remaining stuck in a fluid condition of ‘never-resolving adolescence’. This condition is both symbolised and determined by their peculiar relationship with water in general, and with sea water in particular. The intrinsic fluidity of water indeed is a pivotal element of my investigation: not only does it serve as a metaphor for the protagonists’ fluid identities, but it also describes a distinguishing quality of the language and style in which these works are composed, and through which the characterisation of the protagonists is rendered. Indeed, throughout my analysis, I pay particular attention to the coincidence of linguistic transformations in literature and in cinema, taking as a starting point the mutual connections between literary Modernism and early cinema. Their common tendency towards an aesthetic that productively fuses visual and aural elements aim at creating a new and innovative language and a fluid style that aptly describe a reality in rapid and continuous transformation, of which the fluid adolescent becomes a quintessential representation. By means of this focus on the interrelationship between literature and cinema, the present investigation sheds light on some of the most important artistic and cultural transformations that marked the twentieth century, and which remain relevant today, especially as to the way we read reality through images.
Keywords: Modernism, literature, cinema, French new wave, Truffaut, Joyce, fluidity
 
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