MOURNING AND PHOTOGRAPHY IN CONTEMPORARY FRENCH LITERATURE

This article examines how three contemporary French texts explore two distinct but related preoccupations, mourning and photography. Just as Roland Barthes's La Chambre claire provides a space in which the author may think about photography and simultaneously address his difficulty in mourning his late mother, so Francois Bon's Mecanique can be regarded as a tribute to the author's father, as well as a meta-reflection on photography. In Mummy, mummies Alain Fleischer relates the practice of mummification to photography; the article argues that the insistence on the mummies of Ferentillo throughout the work obliquely refers to the lack of mourning characteristic of the Holocaust.