Moda e fantasmagoria: Truman Capote entre texto e tela

Abstract

This thesis examines phantasmagoria as a phenomenon of modernity and its aesthetic function as articulated in Truman Capote's Summer Crossing and Breakfast at Tiffany's, and Blake Edwards's homonymous film Breakfast at Tiffany's. The hypothesis defended in this thesis is that the two Capotian works and adapted film work share traits identified as phantasmagoria, articulated as aesthetic elements in literary and film creation, which reflect a social paradigm shift. By observing phantasmagoria as an aesthetic element in these works and its transit between them, it is possible to analyze and understand aspects of shared social life in the great urban centers that were characteristic of an era – mainly, the 1950s and 1960s. The research is divided into three chapters: the first discusses conceptual aspects of phantasmagoria, modernity and freedom, the background of world wars, and Walter Benjamin's idea of phantasmagoria; the second chapter shows the narrative structure of the two literary works by Truman Capote, Summer Crossing and Breakfast at Tiffany's, emphasizing their affinities (the first can be seen as the writer's study for the elaboration of the second) and aspects of phantasmagoria transposed from one to the other; the third chapter analyzes the transposition of the literary work Breakfast at Tiffany's to the cinema, the adapted script, the phantasmagoric aspects present in the audiovisual work that is reminiscent of the written works and the modifications perpetrated in function of social issues marked in the decade of 1960. In this final chapter, Roland Barthes' theories of fashion contribute to highlighting the phantasmagoric aspects present in the articulation between person, actress and character in Audrey Hepburn, also highlighting fashion, clothing, costumes and scenery as aesthetic elements that generate phantasmagoria. Fashion as a costume and as art in cinema was able to modify rigid structures of control, precisely because of its capacity to "fictionalize the subject" or "autofiction", demonstrating its willingness to be affected by social changes and also to effect social changes.