Word and Image Interactions – serie

The imaginary as a critical concept originated in the twentieth century and has been theorized in diverse ways. It can be understood as a register of thought; the way we interpret the world; the universe of images, signs, texts, and objects of thought. In this volume, it is explored as it manifests itself in encounters between the verbal and the visual. A number of the essays brought together here explore the transposition of the imaginary in illustrations of texts and verbal renditions of images, as well as in comic books based on paintings or on verbal narratives. Others analyze ways in which books deal with film or television and investigate the imaginary in digital media. Special attention is paid to the imaginary of places and the relationship of the imaginary with memory. Written in English and French, these contributions by European and American scholars demonstrate the various concerns and approaches characteristic of contemporary scholarship in word and image studies.

Art and Science in Word and Image investigates the theme of ‘riddles of form’, exploring how discovery and innovation have functioned inter-dependently between art, literature and the sciences.Using the impact of evolutionary biologist D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form on Modernist practices as springboard into the theme, contributors consider engagements with mysteries of natural form in painting, photography, fiction, etc., as well as theories about cosmic forces, and other fields of knowledge and enquiry. Hence the collection also deals with topics including cultural inscriptions of gardens and landscapes, deconstructions of received history through word and image artworks and texts, experiments in poetic materiality, graphic re-mediations of classic fiction, and textual transactions with animation and photography.Contributors are: Dina Aleshina, Márcia Arbex, Donna T. Canada Smith, Calum Colvin, Francis Edeline, Philippe Enrico, Étienne Février, Madeline B. Gangnes, Eric T. Haskell, Christina Ionescu, Tim Isherwood, Matthew Jarron, Philippe Kaenel, Judy Kendall, Catherine Lanone, Kristen Nassif, Solange Ribeiro de Oliveira, Eric Robertson, Frances Robertson, Cathy Roche-Liger, David Skilton, Melanie Stengele, Barry Sullivan, Alice Tarbuck, Frederik Van Dam.

How has reproduction transformed works of art and literature, their dissemination and their reception? And how does it continue to do so? In what ways have our definitions and practices of reproduction changed over the last centuries thanks to new printing, photographic and digital techniques? These questions are timely. From the medieval copy to contemporary digital culture, including the rise of the printing press and engraving techniques in the Renaissance and the Ancien Régime, myriad modes of reproduction informed both our access to texts and images and our ways of reading, seeing, understanding, discovering and questioning the world.Dans quelle mesure la reproduction transforme-t-elle les œuvres, leur diffusion et leur réception ? De quelles manières les conceptions et les usages de la reproduction ont-ils subi des transformations majeures au cours des derniers siècles avec la diffusion des pratiques d’impression, de la photographie et des techniques numériques ? Ces questions sont d’une actualité incontournable. De la copie médiévale à la culture numérique contemporaine, en passant par l’essor de l’imprimerie et les techniques de gravure à la Renaissance et sous l’Ancien Régime, les différents modes de reproduction informent non seulement nos accès aux textes et aux images, mais aussi nos manières de lire, de voir, de comprendre, découvrir et d’interroger le monde.

To what extent does water constitute an archetypal element, producing moral values and prone to ambivalence? Myths abound with magical fountains, fertile rivers or deadly abysses. Water lends itself to rites of lustration or regenerative baptismal immersion. Circumnavigation has given rise to epic tales of conquest or exploration, populated by monsters and delights. The specificity of this volume is the knotting together of the iconic and the verbal, by renewing our trust in the exemplary regime of art, most capable of apprehending the unpredictable, the ephemeral, and the continuous. Against the backdrop of existential shipwrecks, water wars, the proliferation of microplastics, the scoriae of an unbridled productivity, a work like this one can raise awareness about the right to water, its beneficial virtues, and its inexhaustible imaginary. Dans quelle mesure l’eau constitue-t-elle un élément archétypal, producteur de valeurs et enclin aux ambivalences ? Les mythes regorgent de fontaines magiques, de fleuves matriciels ou d’abysses mortifères. L’eau se prête à des rites de lustration ou d’immersion baptismale régénérante. La circumnavigation a engendré des récits épiques à visée conquérante ou humaniste, peuplés de monstres et de délices. Il s’agit ici d’établir un lien entre l’iconique et le verbal en renouvelant notre confiance dans le régime d’exemplarité de l’art, seul à même d’appréhender ce qui est imprévisible, éphémère et continu. Contre les naufrages existentiels, les guerres de l’eau, le pullulement des microplastiques, scories d’un productivisme effréné, un ouvrage comme celui-ci peut sensibiliser au droit à l’eau partagé, à ses vertus bienfaisantes et à son imaginaire inépuisable.

This volume presents the impressive range of scholarly affinities, approaches, and subjects that characterize today’s word and image studies. The essays, a selection of papers first presented in 2005 at the seventh international conference of the International Association of Word and Image Studies/Association Internationale pour l’Étude des Rapports entre Texte et Image that took place in Philadelphia, are case studies of the diverse configurations of the textual and the iconic. “Elective affinities” — a notion originally borrowed by Goethe for his 1809 novel of the same title from eighteenth-century chemistry — here refers to the active role of the two partners in the relationship of the pictorial and the verbal. Following the experimental modalities opened up by Goethe, the present volume is divided into three sections, which explore, respectively, how words and images can merge in harmony, engage in conflicts and contestations, and, finally, interact in an experimental way that self-consciously tests the boundaries and relations among verbal and visual arts. New perspectives on word and image relationships emerge, in periods, national traditions, works, and materials as different as (among many others) an installation by Marcel Duchamp and the manual accompanying it; the impact of artificial light sources on literature and art; nineteenth-century British illustrations of Native Americans; the contemporary comic book; a seventeenth-century Italian devotional manuscript uniting text, image, and music; Chinese body and performance art..