The Voyeur and the Screen. Literary Paradigms of the Man who Looks

Abstract

The essay is inspired by the consideration of the essentially ancipient nature of the screen as an image support: on the one hand the screen is something that hides, protects and separates; on the other hand, especially in recent modernity, it becomes the device par excellence of the opening of vision, and therefore the essential frame of the image. Through some famous twentieth-century examples, taken from W. Woolrich (It Had to be Murder), A. Robbe-Grillet (Le voyeur, La Jalousie), Gombrowicz (Pornografia, Cosmo), A. Moravia (L’uomo che guarda), the essay shows the function and evolution of the literary representation of what V. Stoichita called, referring to figurative art and cinema, “Sherlock effect”.

Keywords

• Voyeur
• Schermo
• Fiction
• Desiderio
• Erotismo