From the Pictorial to the Photographic: L’Œuvre by Émile Zola between Ekphrastic Representations and Intermedial Handovers

Abstract

Published in 1886, L’Œuvre is the novel by Zola in which text and pictorial imagery engage in a dense interplay of narrative, aesthetic, perceptual, and metatextual references, resulting in a literary as well as intermedial fresco of the cultural system of Second Empire Paris. This contribution analyzes the work starting from the relationship that the pictorial images scattered throughout the narrative establish with their respective ekphrastic modes. The aim is to sketch the interweaving between literature and the visual arts, with a particular focus on the intermediality that fuses images and texts in L’Œuvre, a novel that culminates in a reflection subtly revealing the need for a new kind of gaze—one that cannot disregard the photographic medium and that also anticipates the cinematic one, whose emergence was then imminent. The author inscribes the crisis of classical representation within the literary tradition, doing so in a way that forms a compendium of contemporary aesthetic consciousness, highlighting the contradictions and anxieties, aspirations and failures of a phase in cultural, artistic, and media history that continues to cast its light on our present.