“This is me with Augustine, February 21, 1943”: Importance of Photographs in Everything Is Illuminated

DOI

10.2991/klua-18.2018.3How to use a DOI?

Keywords

communication, historiography, multimodal, photographs, reality, trauma

Abstract

Multimodal communication can simply be defined as communication through modes such as pictures, gestures, sign languages, and such. Photographs are relevant to literary studies because they too can narrate. Photographs can perform as unreliable narrators, drawing fuzzy borders between reality and imagination and destabilizing the concept of absolute truth. Photographs are embedded within collective memory and are able to build a foundation for remembrance. They demonstrate that memory in photos exceeds that of orality. In Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, photographs take a vital role along with written language. The paper aims at demonstrating the importance of photographs as a means to shed lights on constructs such as truth, emotions, memory and space. It deals with how photos communicate with people, how they can be differently perceived and why one should not accept their images as free from manipulation. The next part investigates what emotions photographs can stand for, and the connection between them and the be holder. Finally, the paper dwells on discourses photographs become intertwined with throughout the narration of the novel.

Copyright

© 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Md Abu Shahid Abdullah
PY  - 2018/07
DA  - 2018/07
TI  - “This is me with Augustine, February 21, 1943”: Importance of Photographs in Everything Is Illuminated
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Phenomena in Multimodal Communication (KLUA 2018)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 22
EP  - 26
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/klua-18.2018.3
DO  - 10.2991/klua-18.2018.3
ID  - Abdullah2018/07
ER  -