The Art of the Text: Visuality in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literary and Other Media
edited by Susan Harrow
University of Wales Press, 2013 Cloth: 978-0-7083-2659-6 | eISBN: 978-0-7083-2660-2
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK
The Art of the Text contributes to the dialogue of textual studies with visual culture studies by focusing on the processes through which writers think and readers respond visually. This volume’s contributors apply their backgrounds in literature, screen, and visual studies, to explore the visuality of the literary and nonliterary text with a sustained focus on French works of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Visuality is appraised here, not as a state, but as a means of adaptation, resistance, negotiation, and transformation. In the process of reading visually, the contributors offer new insights on visual-textual relations in canonical texts drawn from romanticism, naturalism, surrealism, and high modernism, and across a range of media, from film, textiles, and television, to fan literature and picture language.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Susan Harrow is the Ashley Watkins Professor of French at the University of Bristol, UK. She is the author of Zola, the Body Modern: Pressures and Prospects of Representation and The Material, the Real, and the Fractured Self: Subjectivity and Representation from Rimbaud to Réda.
REVIEWS
“The Art of the Text is a rich and well-conceived collection of essays that, by virtue of the coherence of the vision underpinning the volume and the range of topics, genre, and media that it addresses, makes a distinctive and valuable contribution to word and image studies.”
— Jean J. Duffy, University of Edinburgh
“How do writers think visually? How do readers respond visually to the written word? This exciting volume offers fresh insights within the rapidly evolving field of visual culture studies by pinpointing an important but as of yet underdeveloped area: the visuality of text. Drawing on a wide spectrum of practices, each affording a compelling instance of cross-fertilization between the written and the visual, the volume assembles wonderful close readings of important experimental works. Twelve international experts show how canonical creators have been inspired by thinking between the written word and a range of visual phenomena related to photography, textile, cinema, television, sculpture, painting, portraits, Isotype symbols, colors, lights, and black holes. The Art of the Text deserves a place on the bookshelves of anyone interested in intermedial adventure.”
— Shirley Jordan, Queen Mary, University of London
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Series editor’s preface
Acknowledgements
List of illustrations
Contributors
Introduction
Susan Harrow
I Thinking the visual image
1 Jules Verne: The Unbearable Brightness of Seeing
Timothy Unwin
2 Affinities of Photography and Syntax in Proust’s À la recherche du temps purdu
Áine Larkin
3 Portraits and Neologisms: Understanding the Visual in Henri Michaux’s ‘Voyage en Grande Garabagne’
Nina Parish
4 The ‘trou noir’: Visualizations of Nihilism in Nietzsche and Modiano
Jenny Devine
II Intermedial migrations in the 1920s
5 Painting and Cinema in Aragon’s Anicet
Katherine Shingler
6 Isotopes and Elephants: Picture-Language as Visual Writing in the Work and Correspondence of Otto Neurath
Michelle Henning
7 Colette: An Eye for Textiles
Anne Freadman
8 Stars as Sculpture in the 1920s Fan-Magazine Interview
Michael Williams
III Visual negotiations and adaptations
9 Victor Hugo and Painting: the Exceptional Case of the Orientales
Karen Quandt
10 Visions and Revisions: Zola, Cardinal and L’Œuvre
Kate Griffiths
11 Donner à voir:Poetic Language and Visual Representation according to Paul Éluard
Peter Hawkins
12 ‘La lettre au cinéma n’est pas une excellente solution’: A Heteromedial Analysis of Chantel Akerman’s Proust Adaption
The Art of the Text: Visuality in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literary and Other Media
edited by Susan Harrow
University of Wales Press, 2013 Cloth: 978-0-7083-2659-6 eISBN: 978-0-7083-2660-2
The Art of the Text contributes to the dialogue of textual studies with visual culture studies by focusing on the processes through which writers think and readers respond visually. This volume’s contributors apply their backgrounds in literature, screen, and visual studies, to explore the visuality of the literary and nonliterary text with a sustained focus on French works of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Visuality is appraised here, not as a state, but as a means of adaptation, resistance, negotiation, and transformation. In the process of reading visually, the contributors offer new insights on visual-textual relations in canonical texts drawn from romanticism, naturalism, surrealism, and high modernism, and across a range of media, from film, textiles, and television, to fan literature and picture language.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Susan Harrow is the Ashley Watkins Professor of French at the University of Bristol, UK. She is the author of Zola, the Body Modern: Pressures and Prospects of Representation and The Material, the Real, and the Fractured Self: Subjectivity and Representation from Rimbaud to Réda.
REVIEWS
“The Art of the Text is a rich and well-conceived collection of essays that, by virtue of the coherence of the vision underpinning the volume and the range of topics, genre, and media that it addresses, makes a distinctive and valuable contribution to word and image studies.”
— Jean J. Duffy, University of Edinburgh
“How do writers think visually? How do readers respond visually to the written word? This exciting volume offers fresh insights within the rapidly evolving field of visual culture studies by pinpointing an important but as of yet underdeveloped area: the visuality of text. Drawing on a wide spectrum of practices, each affording a compelling instance of cross-fertilization between the written and the visual, the volume assembles wonderful close readings of important experimental works. Twelve international experts show how canonical creators have been inspired by thinking between the written word and a range of visual phenomena related to photography, textile, cinema, television, sculpture, painting, portraits, Isotype symbols, colors, lights, and black holes. The Art of the Text deserves a place on the bookshelves of anyone interested in intermedial adventure.”
— Shirley Jordan, Queen Mary, University of London
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Series editor’s preface
Acknowledgements
List of illustrations
Contributors
Introduction
Susan Harrow
I Thinking the visual image
1 Jules Verne: The Unbearable Brightness of Seeing
Timothy Unwin
2 Affinities of Photography and Syntax in Proust’s À la recherche du temps purdu
Áine Larkin
3 Portraits and Neologisms: Understanding the Visual in Henri Michaux’s ‘Voyage en Grande Garabagne’
Nina Parish
4 The ‘trou noir’: Visualizations of Nihilism in Nietzsche and Modiano
Jenny Devine
II Intermedial migrations in the 1920s
5 Painting and Cinema in Aragon’s Anicet
Katherine Shingler
6 Isotopes and Elephants: Picture-Language as Visual Writing in the Work and Correspondence of Otto Neurath
Michelle Henning
7 Colette: An Eye for Textiles
Anne Freadman
8 Stars as Sculpture in the 1920s Fan-Magazine Interview
Michael Williams
III Visual negotiations and adaptations
9 Victor Hugo and Painting: the Exceptional Case of the Orientales
Karen Quandt
10 Visions and Revisions: Zola, Cardinal and L’Œuvre
Kate Griffiths
11 Donner à voir:Poetic Language and Visual Representation according to Paul Éluard
Peter Hawkins
12 ‘La lettre au cinéma n’est pas une excellente solution’: A Heteromedial Analysis of Chantel Akerman’s Proust Adaption
Jørgen Bruhn
Translation sources
Bibliography
Index
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC