The Many Faces of Sylvia Plath: Photographs in Literary Biographies
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13135/2281-6658/3449Parole chiave:
Sylvia Plath, Literary Biography, Comparative Biography, Confessional Poetry, Cultural MemoryAbstract
Biography—unlike fiction—is a referential genre (Lejeune 1994, 39-40), it constantly refers to a kind of truth or reality that lies outside the textual level. Photographs in biographies function as powerful referring devices, because, as Roland Barthes (1980) put it, the essence of the photograph is “ça-a-été” (120). Regardless of this evidential character, photographs do not usually stand for themselves in biographies. They need description and textual explanation and are, thus, reduced to a merely illustrative function. This paper analyses photographs in four biographies on Sylvia Plath, who is the subject of more than 20 different literary portraits. It shows that there is a strong emphasis on Plath’s private life on the one hand, and a lack of Plath’s craft and public life on the other. By using Marita Sturken’s (1999) concept of “cultural memory” (178), this article argues that a strict differentiation between public and private cannot help us read and understand the photographs in Plath’s biographies.Downloads
I dati di download non sono ancora disponibili.
##submission.downloads##
Pubblicato
2019-06-28
Fascicolo
Sezione
Percorsi
Licenza
Gli autori mantengono i diritti sulla loro opera e cedono alla rivista il diritto di prima pubblicazione dell'opera, contemporaneamente licenziata sotto una Licenza Creative Commons - Attribuzione che permette ad altri di condividere l'opera indicando la paternità intellettuale e la prima pubblicazione su questa rivista.