Finding Purpose in the Photographs of Others: Ransom Riggs and Isabelle Monnin

In Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2011) and Les Gens dans l’enveloppe (2015) respectively, American writer Ransom Riggs and French journalist and writer Isabelle Monnin illustrate Barthes’s statement that photographs only attest to what has been. Both became “haunted” enough by picture...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Michèle Bacholle
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Université de Bourgogne 2019-06-01
Series:Interfaces
Subjects:
Online Access:https://journals.openedition.org/interfaces/648
Description
Summary:In Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2011) and Les Gens dans l’enveloppe (2015) respectively, American writer Ransom Riggs and French journalist and writer Isabelle Monnin illustrate Barthes’s statement that photographs only attest to what has been. Both became “haunted” enough by pictures of others that they felt the need to give them a context. This article examines how both writers – albeit differently – integrated photographs in a dynamic photo-textual project that requires the reader-spectator’s active participation in the creation of meaning. In addition to being more complex, we will see how Monnin’s project’s transpersonal nature calls for a psychogenealogical reading.
ISSN:2647-6754