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..
Catriona MacLeod: Introduction
Summaries
Union Michael R. Taylor: Consulting the Manual: Word and Image in Marcel Duchamp’s
Étant donnés Adriana Dragomir: Living and Dying in the Limelight: Performing the Self in Frida Kahlo’s Diary and Paintings
Laurence Wuidar: Imbrication de l’image, du texte et de la musique dans un corpus de prières énigmatiques à la Vierge
Cordula Grewe: The
Künstlerroman as Romantic Arabesque: Parody, Collaboration, and the Making of
The Modern Vasari (1854)
Karen E. Brown: The “Inscapes” of Louis le Brocquy
Robert Grant: American Scenery/Canadian Scenery: Conflicting Views of Indigenes in Mid-Nineteenth-Century British Portrayals of the American Continent
Miriam Harris: Cartoonists as Matchmakers: The Vibrant Relationship of Text and Image in the Work of Lynda Barry
Conflict Steen Christiansen: The Truth of the Word, the Falsity of the Image:
Transmetropolitan’s Critique of the Society of the Spectacle
Danielle Leenaerts: Le magazine français
Vu (1928–40): Naissance de l’information visuelle et utopie de la substitution de l’image photographique au texte écrit
Hubert Locher: From Ekphrasis to History: Verbal Transformations of the Display of Picture Galleries—Wilhelm Heinse and Friedrich Schlegel
Lauren S. Weingarden: Modernizing History and Historicizing Modernity: Baudelaire and Baudelairean Representations of Contemporaneity
Valentin Nussbaum: Serial Künstler: Portrait of the Artist as a Malefactor
Jonathan Marshall: Hypnotic Performance and the Falsity of Appearances: The Aesthetics of Medical Spectatorship and Axel Munthe’s Critique of Jean-Martin Charcot
Experiment Susana Oliveira: New Light and Old Shadows: Industrial Illumination and its
Imaginaire Jennifer A. Greenhill: Illustrating the Shadow of Doubt: Henry James, Blindness, and “The Real Thing”
Eric T. Haskell: Picturing Paradise: Baudelaire’s “L’Invitation au voyage”
Julia Friedman: The Writing-Drawing Continuum of Alexei Remizov
Spyros Papapetros: Aby Warburg as Reader of Gottfried Semper: Reflections on the Cosmic Character of Ornament
Cristina Cuevas-Wolf: John Heartfield’s Insects and the “Idea” of Natural History
María DeGuzmán: The Photographic Thought of Latina/o Literature and Cultural Critique
Susan Nurmi-Schomers: Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein, Fassbinder:
Découpage Aesthetics on the Divide
Birgit Mersmann: (Ideo-)Logical Alliances between Image and Script: Calligraphic Reconfigurations in Contemporary Chinese Art
Contributors
Index