ABSTRACT

Though literary studies has developed a rich understanding of the way that certain Modernist, early-, and mid-twentieth-century writers responded to cinematic conventions in their work, and to a lesser extent postmodern novelists as well, we do not have a full account of how contemporary fiction is responding to the visual norms embedded within cinema, nor how readers intimately familiar with filmic form might be experiencing these novels. By reconsidering film and literature in light of the groundbreaking work on the literary imagination done by Elaine Scarry in Dreaming by the Book, this article isolates a strand of criticism from recent decades that asks very different questions of literature to those usually asked by film theorists, cultural studies critics, and philosophers interested in the subject. Via a detailed examination of Ingmar Bergman's overtly cinematic short story, ‘Cries and Whispers’, which serves as an unusually direct instance of the multiple connections between literary and cinematic visuality, the article opens up broader questions about the ethics of seeing, and the ways in which contemporary fiction – and indeed twentieth-century fiction more broadly – might be understood in relation to cinema.

摘要

尽管文学研究已经对某些现代主义、20 世纪早期和中期作家以及在较小程度上对后现代小说家的作品做出反应的方式有了丰富的理解，但我们没有一个完整的描述。当代小说如何回应电影中嵌入的视觉规范，以及熟悉电影形式的读者如何体验这些小说。根据伊莱恩·斯卡里 (Elaine Scarry) 在《梦中梦》(Dreaming by the Book) 中对文学想象力所做的开创性工作，重新考虑电影和文学，本文将近几十年来提出的批评文学问题与电影理论家、文化研究批评家和对该主题感兴趣的哲学家通常提出的问题截然不同。通过对英格玛·伯格曼 (Ingmar Bergman) 公开的电影短篇小说《哭泣与耳语》(Cries and Whispers) 的详细研究，该小说作为文学和电影视觉性之间多重联系的异常直接实例，这篇文章提出了关于观看伦理以及观看方式的更广泛问题其中当代小说——实际上是更广泛的 20 世纪小说——可以与电影联系起来理解。