| In this dissertation I look at the influences of photography on specific written narratives of turn-of-the-century France. These narratives range from news stories, advertisements and feuilleton of the Belle Epoque daily papers, to a popular series of crime novel entitled Fantomas written by two journalists between 1911 and 1913, to Andre Gide's Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1927). In order to specify the new technology presented by photography in the first half of the nineteenth century I look closely at the series as a form redefined by the photographic process and images, and as a mode which facilitates the response by certain twentieth-century narratives against nineteenth-century narrative forms.;In the first chapter, entitled "Series and Collections," I begin by focusing on the collection as an order which is central to nineteenth-century rational arrangements and institionalized methods of classification. The collection, as a place where functional objects are transformed into images, is an order in which seriality can be understood as that which accounts for its (generally) unrestricted expansion and for the play between the "real" and the imaginary within the frame of these images.;In the second chapter, I look at the historical role played by photography in the nineteenth century, specifically for Eugene Disderi's invention of the carte-de-visite, for Alphone Bertillon's police identification methods and for Etienne Jules Marey's scientific research on physical movement. These three moments in the history of photography reveal how photographic technology (process and images) defined against its implicit tendencies towards the imaginary, was used for the exclusive rationalized representation of the "real.".;In the third chapter, I focus on the Belle Epoque daily print media in order to show how seriality, redefined by photography, appears in newspaper narratives especially through the category of "scandal" as the organizational means with which to produce and maintain markets of readers as consumers of narratives.;In the fourth chapter, I turn to the popular fictional narrative series entitled Fantomas, written by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, in order to show how seriality redefined by photography is deployed by a written narrative in order to provide a critique of the hermeneutic and perceptual methods inherited from the nineteenth century through a use of cliches, and also through Fantomas, a criminal-hero who constantly evades law and order through a series of untraceable disguises.;Lastly, I look at Andre Gide's Les Faux-Monnayeurs where seriality conceived through the problem of counterfeit is posed not only in monetary terms, but also in regards to the search for both aesthetically pure and commercially successful writing practices. |
