Articles

The Physiognomy of an Impossible Return: Relational Geometries Between Autobiography, Narration and Image in Every Day Is for the Thief by Teju Cole

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.13.41030

Keywords:

Teju Cole, phototext, visual studies, Everyday Is for the Thief

Abstract

From the start of his career, Teju Cole has presented himself simultaneously as writer and as photographer, always directing his creative production towards a space with a hybrid and plural nature, going beyond and contaminating performative and semiotic codes, making the textual and visual field interact through particular poietic and compositional strategies. The short novel Every Day Is for the Thief (2007), conceived and structured as an internally layered autobiographical phototextual device, is at the same time also a travel reportage, a memoir, a photo-essay, in which the author's experience is declined in that liminal and porous limbo in which fiction and non-fiction tend to converge. Through an analytical reading, this essay aims to investigate the expressive resources and compositional strategies through which writing and image interact with each other inside the textual field, constantly balanced between depiction and re-semantization, between production and reproduction of the existing, providing a hermeneutic tool of a double matrix to embrace the surrounding reality, trying to provide a representation of memorialistic and individual identity that is at the same time the bearer of universalizable meanings.

Author Biography

Niccolò Amelii, Università degli Studi "G. d'Annunzio" di Chieti-Pescara

Niccolò Amelii holds a PhD in ‘Languages, Literatures and Cultures in Contact’ at the University 'G. D'Annunzio' of Chieti-Pescara. He has been visiting scholar at the CRIX-Etudes Romanes of the Université Paris Nanterre. His research project focuses on narrative representations of the metropolis in twentieth-century Italian literature. He also deals with non-fiction, modernism and neomodernism, relations between writing and image. He has published articles and essays on Pavese, Vittorini, Ginzburg, Landolfi, Ramondino, Tobino, Tondelli, Joyce, Dos Passos. He is a member of ALUS (Association for Literary Urban Studies) and Fringe Urban Narratives.

Published

2024-09-13

Issue

Section

Articles