Since its invention, photography has been believed to promise a sense of fullness and endowed with the capacity to capture everything. On the other hand, such alleged potentiality to capture all is yet found limited to the surface, and photography turns out to be a sort of art without depth. The paradoxical tension between surface and depth has drawn critical attention. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes laments the "flatness" of photographs while pondering over their depth which evokes "a kind of subtle beyond". Similarly, in reading family album, Marianne Hirsch illuminates the excluded "off-frame", simultaneously underlying photographic plenitude and overthrowing the imaginary fullness of the photographic images. Engaging with critical discourses on photography, this paper seeks to explore the tension between surface and depth in the literary representations of photographs. Two literary works are in point; one is Paul Auster’s semi-autobiographic narrative or his memoir, The Invention of Solitude, and the other is Obasan written by the Japanese Canadian author Joy Kogawa, both of which highlight the tension between surface and depth in their verbal representations of photographs. Aware of the imaginary fullness that photography promises but fails to fulfill, both literary works represent photographs in a way that resonates with Roland Barthes’s idea of punctum.

Authors:
Chiou-Rung Deng, Tamkang University, Taiwan

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Chiou-Rung Deng is an Associate Professor at the Department of English, Tamkang University, Taiwan. Her research foci include 19th-century American women writers, postcolonial discourses, Asian American literature, and diasporic literature.

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