Imaginary Films in Literature

Since cinema is a composite language, describing a movie is a complex challenge for critics and writers, and greatly differs from the ancient and successful genre of the ekphrasis, the literary description of a visual work of art. Imaginary Films in Literature deals with a specific and significant case within this broad category: the description of imaginary, non-existent movies – a practice that is more widespread than one might expect, especially in North American postmodern fiction. Along with theoretical contributions, the book includes the analyses of some case studies focusing on the borders between the visual and the literary, intermedial practices of hybridization, the limits of representation, and other related notions such as “memory”, “fragmentation”, “desire”, “genre”, “authorship”, and “censorship”.

Stefano Ercolino, Ph.D. (2013), University of L’Aquila, is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Underwood International College, Yonsei University (Seoul, Korea). He is the author of The Novel-Essay, 1884-1947 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” to Roberto Bolaño’s “2666” (Bloomsbury, 2014; Bompiani, 2015).

Massimo Fusillo, Ph.D. (1987), University of Calabria, is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of L’Aquila (Italy), and member of the Executive Council of the International Association of Comparative Literature. He is the author of Estetica della letteratura, (Il Mulino, 2009; Machado, 2012) and Feticci (Il Mulino, 2012; Champion, 2014).

Mirko Lino, Ph.D. (2010), University of L’Aquila, is Adjunct Professor of Film History and Literary Criticism at the University of L'Aquila (Italy) and Research Affiliate in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Palermo (Italy). He has published the monograph L’apocalisse postmoderna tra letteratura e cinema: Catastrofi, oggetti, metropoli, corpi (Le Lettere, 2014).

Luca Zenobi, Ph.D. (2004), University of Pisa, is Assistant Professor of German at the University of L’Aquila (Italy). Among his most recent publications, La natura e l’arte: Interpretazione del reale ed estetica della libertà nel pensiero di Diderot e Schiller (ETS, 2005), and Faust: Il mito dalla tradizione orale al post-pop (Carocci, 2013).