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- Title
On Pearl and Photography.
- Authors
Terakes, Sophie
- Abstract
This article examines the anonymous medieval dream poem, Pearl, through photographic theory, chiefly employing Susan Sontag's book On Photography. While the poem has been analysed as numerous different artforms including a painting, a piece of jewellery and a precious jewel, this article argues that photography (albeit anachronistically) offers an especially useful framework for examining mourning in the poem. Photography is a medium bound up by contradictions (as Sontag writes, the camera is both a scientific tool and an instrument of high art). It thus provides the language necessary to discuss the poem's multivalent depiction of grief, and the tension between pleasure and pain that I argue resides at the heart of the poem. I will examine the poem's photographic qualities in three sections, focusing first on light, then death, then iterability, using each concept to draw out the work's emotive paradoxes. Photography, being a medium constituted by light, offers a rich analogy for the play between fantasy and reality at work within the Pearl-maiden. Similarly, Sontag's writing on the eternality and deathliness of all photographed subjects recalls the tragic relationship between remembering and forgetting that haunts the father's dream. Finally, this article applies the philosophy of photographic reproducibility to the maiden, examining her contradictory status as an indistinguishable copy and priceless original. This article contends that photographs, in their materiality, fragility, ghostliness and (often) emotional pathos, analogise the vain paternal longing that underpins the poem.
- Subjects
SONTAG, Susan, 1933-2004; BEREAVEMENT; PHOTOGRAPHY; ANALOGY; SCIENTIFIC apparatus &; instruments; DIAMOND jewelry; PARADOX
- Publication
Ceræ: An Australasian Journal of Medieval & Early Modern Studies, 2023, Vol 10, p132
- ISSN
2204-146X
- Publication type
Article