Visual inspirations of A Little Life

ABSTRACT

Hanya Yanagihara’s critically acclaimed second novel A Little Life was published in 2015 and despite its length and disturbing thematic concerns soon became a bestseller. Yanagihara has laid her creative process bare in various interviews and has been open about the intermedial inspiration she has drawn from photography and painting. These sources provide an opportunity for the scholar to accurately and precisely trace how visual arts interact with the text before, during, and even after its conception. Critics predominantly responded to the novel about how comprehensively the author depicted child sexual abuse, violence, and trauma. The author merges generic conventions such as the Bildungsroman and fairy tale while constructing her plot and draws a significant amount of her inspiration from images. Seemingly contrasting affective impressions emanating from the images and the text converge in harmony and lead to an apt portrayal of the protagonist’s psyche and the reader’s ambiguous perception of his trauma. The article scrutinizes the use of photographs, paintings, and other visual material in the creative process of the novel in an ekphrastic mode both descriptively and non-descriptively, the latter to create a mood in the story rather than present a realistic depiction of the objects in question.

KEYWORDS:

• Ekphrasis
• Hanya Yanagihara
• A Little Life
• trauma
• photography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 It has not been possible to reproduce the various images referenced in this text due to copyright restrictions. However, all of them are available to view online via internet browser searches.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cansu Özge Özmen

Cansu Özge Özmen received her BA degree at Bilkent University, American Culture and Literature department. She got her MA degree in American Studies from the University of Heidelberg. On being awarded a PhD fellowship from the Intercultural Humanities department at Jacobs University Bremen, she wrote her dissertation on nineteenth-century American travel narratives of the Orient and received her PhD degree in Literature in February 2010. She currently works as an Associate Professor at the Department of English and Literature at Tekirdağ Namık Kemal University. Her research interests include nineteenth-century American travel literature, contemporary American fiction, Antinatalism, Ecocriticism, and Animal Studies.