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A Time of Transition: Visual Representations of the Book of Revelation in Germany in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period

Natasha O'Hear

in Contrasting Images of the Book of Revelation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Art: A Case Study in Visual Exegesis

This chapter concentrates on visual interpretations of the Book of Revelation from the late fifteenth century to the early sixteenth century, with particular reference to the Koberger Bible of 1483, ... More

This chapter concentrates on visual interpretations of the Book of Revelation from the late fifteenth century to the early sixteenth century, with particular reference to the Koberger Bible of 1483, Dürer's Apocalypse Series of 1498/1511 and Cranach's illustrations for Luther's New Testament of 1522. All three woodcut series appear within examples of the new print media and thus full attention is given in each case to their more public context. The close relationship between the three works, as well as with their Anglo‐Norman predecessors, is also explored throughout, although they all have distinctive hermeneutical emphases. The koberger illustrations offer a literal yet fairly compressed interpretation of the source‐text. Dürer's Apocalypse Series was primarily an aesthetic enterprise yet simultaneously represents a theologically sensitive presentation of text and images of the Book of Revelation. Cranach's Apocalypse illustrations meanwhile were both instructive and polemical, a visual counterpart to the Lutheran Reformation. All three hermeneutical emphases are explored in detail in this chapter.Less

‘Beyond Words’: Stevie Smith as a Visual Artist

William May

in Stevie Smith and Authorship

This chapter considers the importance of art and visual culture in Smith's work. It notes the contested role of Smith's illustrations in her critical reception, considers her representations of ... More

This chapter considers the importance of art and visual culture in Smith's work. It notes the contested role of Smith's illustrations in her critical reception, considers her representations of galleries in the early essays ‘Art’ (1937) and ‘Private Views’ (1938), and details ecphrastic depictions of paintings in her poetry. It considers Smith's illustrations with reference to the artists George Grosz, Aubrey Beardsley, and Goya, notes her ambivalent relationship to these visual sources, and reveals her practice of illustrating her poems only to provide deliberately disjunctive sketches when the time came for their publication.Less

Coda: Image-Text Interfaces, Material and Digital

Hertha D. Sweet Wong

in Picturing Identity: Contemporary American Autobiography in Image and Text

The Coda reiterates that the post-civil rights era in the United States–with the coalescence of rebellion against historic modes of thought, heightened awareness of the politics of race and gender, ... More

The Coda reiterates that the post-civil rights era in the United States–with the coalescence of rebellion against historic modes of thought, heightened awareness of the politics of race and gender, and challenges to the artificiality of disciplinary silos –gave rise to a period of intense innovation in autobiographical expression in text and image. During this same period, profoundly new possibilities for image-text self-expression arose as the internet was developed, digital tools were generated, and social media sites were launched. Like the interart autobiographies discussed in Picturing Identity, digital media demands interactive engagement. The conclusion discusses e-poetry as a digital descendant of the forms discussed in the book. Finally, the chapter suggests that scholarly claims that digital technology itself decenters the subject must be reconsidered. It is not technology alone that determines subjectivity. All the writers-artists discussed thematize a split subject that seeks, usually futilely, wholeness.Less

Introduction

Hertha D. Sweet Wong

in Picturing Identity: Contemporary American Autobiography in Image and Text

Arising from a period of intense social upheaval and technological innovation, late 20th-century writers and artists challenge inherited notions of subjectivity and experiment with new hybrid forms ... More

Arising from a period of intense social upheaval and technological innovation, late 20th-century writers and artists challenge inherited notions of subjectivity and experiment with new hybrid forms of autobiographies composed of both image and text. The introduction provides an overview of how disciplinary boundaries have become more porous, leading to a variety of transdisciplinary visual-verbal self-narrations. The chapter reviews key concerns from Autobiography Studies and Visual Studies and how they redefine image-text relations as a matrix or a network with many surfaces and axes of interaction. The introduction also explains the organization of the book: the work of eight writers-artists–Peter Najarian, Leslie Marmon Silko, Art Spiegelman, Julie Chen, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Carrie Mae Weems, Faith Ringgold, and Edgar Heap of Birds, moving from the most literature-based to the most art-based. In dialogue with historical trauma and its consequences, each author asks crucial questions about American identity.Less

Critiques

David Jhave Johnston

in Aesthetic Animism: Digital Poetry's Ontological Implications

For literary theorists, critics, students, and philosophically inclined readers: this chapter provides an overview of theories about language that leads toward a notion of spoems (poetic objects), ... More

For literary theorists, critics, students, and philosophically inclined readers: this chapter provides an overview of theories about language that leads toward a notion of spoems (poetic objects), outlines a brief history of image-texts, attempts a symbiotic merger between two historically distinct ways (materiality and ontologies) of considering poetry, and contains central arguments about aesthetic animism. These concern the plausibility of living language as an outcome of the convergence of literature and computation, the volumetric possibility that archetypal letterforms relate to internal physiognomy, and discourse on how these archetypal forms might be attained in ways that are both synesthetic and synergetic.Less

Cinema as Imaginary Medium in French Poetry

Christophe Wall-Romana

in Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry

The introduction explains cinema's esthetic and sensorial appeal for French poets since Mallarmé, and defines cinepoetry (cinema-in-writing) as a corpus, despite its porous boundaries. After ... More

The introduction explains cinema's esthetic and sensorial appeal for French poets since Mallarmé, and defines cinepoetry (cinema-in-writing) as a corpus, despite its porous boundaries. After analyzing examples of cross-medium writing, the Introduction tackles the pre avant-garde works of Edmond Rostand and Jules Romains who sought in 1908 to integrate cinema in their poetry—before Futurism. Cinepoetry as ancillary text (imaginary film) and virtual film (still only text) then developed in concert with the poetics of L’Esprit Nouveau, Dada and Surrealism. Heralding cinepoetry was a major shift from the Romantic imagination to the ‘imaginary’, a rare word until it was used by Villiers de L’Isle-Adam to describe the cyborg's filmic realm in The Eve of the Future. The Introduction shows that the imaginary became a philosophical notion for Sartre, Bachelard and Lacan only when defined against cinema: Morin corrected this bias in 1956 by acknowledging cinema as the core of the imaginary. A final section revises the theory of text and images via the ‘cine-graphic field’ which put in motion texts and letters in the 1900-20 era, in movies (Cohl, Lumière bros., Perret, Feuillade), in writing (Proust, Roussel, Reverdy, Apollinaire), and especially through intertitle art (Gance, L’Herbier, Epstein, Dulac).Less

Introduction: addressing the other woman

Kimberly Lamm

in Addressing the other woman: Textual correspondences in feminist art and writing

This chapter introduces the importance of text and images of writing for feminist art practices in the late 1960s and 1970s. Beginning with the 2008 exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, ... More

This chapter introduces the importance of text and images of writing for feminist art practices in the late 1960s and 1970s. Beginning with the 2008 exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, it demonstrates that an engagement with language was a significant part of women artists’ efforts to resist the ways in which late-twentieth-century visual culture reinforces the idea that women should serve as the other of patriarchal culture. The introduction presents the three artists who are the focus of the book – Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly – and argues that the ‘writerly’ qualities of the artwork they produced in the 1970s undermines the visual dominance of spectacle culture and the production of woman as a sign that represents passivity and sexual availability. The introduction also makes a case for pairing the artwork of Piper, Spero, and Kelly with the writings of Angela Davis, Valerie Solanas, and Laura Mulvey. In aligned historical contexts, these writers also addressed the limited range of images through which women were allowed to appear, and thereby suggest what it means to receive the artwork’s call to other women to collaborate on the project of creating a feminist imaginary.Less

Leslie Marmon Silko’s Photo-Narratives: “A Story Connected with Every Place, Every Object in the Landscape”

Hertha D. Sweet Wong

in Picturing Identity: Contemporary American Autobiography in Image and Text

This chapter explores Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s less discussed works: the photo-texts Storyteller and Sacred Water. The chapter shows how rather than using images to illustrate or ... More

This chapter explores Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s less discussed works: the photo-texts Storyteller and Sacred Water. The chapter shows how rather than using images to illustrate or explain the text, Silko uses uncaptioned, floating images to create a “field of vision for the reading of the text,” thus emphasizing structurally a Pueblo sense of cyclical time. Pueblo identity, Silko insists, is defined by a long historical connection to place. She reveals how human relationships with land, plants, and animals link past, present, and future into a web of interdependence, highlighting her notion of an ecocentric, rather than homocentric, subjectivity.Less

Chapter Four“I Am Crucified in Christ” (Galatians 2:20): The Kitzingen Crucifixion Miniature and Visions of the Apostle Paul

Felice Lifshitz

in Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia: A Study of Manuscript Transmission and Monastic Culture

This chapter discusses the famous full page crucifixion miniature in Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek M.p.th.f. 69 in relation to the text it was intended to introduce, namely, the letters of St. ... More

This chapter discusses the famous full page crucifixion miniature in Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek M.p.th.f. 69 in relation to the text it was intended to introduce, namely, the letters of St. Paul. The chapter argues that the key figures in the image (the large central figure amid a group in a boat, and the figure on the large central cross) represent both Paul and Jesus. The chapter identifies the many sources of inspiration used by the Kitzingen theologian-artist, including the Dittochaeon of Prudentius, Origen’s Homilies on Numbers, and a version of the Visio Pauli (Vision of St. Paul) very likely written at Kitzingen and certainly present in its library collection. A gendered analysis of this image shows how the theologian-artist generally emphasized the universal and thus gender-egalitarian nature of the message of Pauline Christianity, but also expressed views designed to support professed women’s central and active role in the ecclesiastical life of the Main Valley.Less

The Negative Plate; or, Absalom, Absalom! and the camera’s voice

Julian Murphet

in Faulkner's Media Romance

This chapter examines the structural tension between voice and image in Absalom, Absalom!, relating the novel’s formal resolutions to developments in photography, the printing press, and talking ... More

This chapter examines the structural tension between voice and image in Absalom, Absalom!, relating the novel’s formal resolutions to developments in photography, the printing press, and talking pictures. Considering the cognate set of mid-1930s relationships between word and image in the “photographic essay,” newspapers, and film, the chapter situates Faulkner’s artistic achievements in the context of larger cultural concerns about the storytelling capacity of visual images, the limits of textuality as an indexical medium, and the media’s commercial imperatives. The chapter directly relates these concerns to the tension in Faulkner’s aesthetic ideology between modernistic imperatives and antiquated romantic tendencies, since here the passage between text and image implies the “inheritance” and transmission of a romance gene from one media ecology to another by way of a hypnotizing tall tale. The chapter also looks closely at Pylon, examining a cultural mode of production and its relationship to capitalism more generally.Less

Introduction

Hentschel Klaus

in Visual Cultures in Science and Technology: A Comparative History

This chapter provides a detailed survey of the vast literature on visual cultures in science, technology and medicine, starting with the term ‘culture’ and then portraying the concept of ‘scopic ... More

This chapter provides a detailed survey of the vast literature on visual cultures in science, technology and medicine, starting with the term ‘culture’ and then portraying the concept of ‘scopic regimes’ introduced by Martin Jay, against which is positioned the author’s narrower concept of ‘visual domains.’ Visual versus textual elements in scientific representations are discussed, as well as text–image interplay and ekphrasis. Visual rhetorics and argumentation with images are documented with selected examples. Svetlana Alpers’s rich portrayal of the Dutch mapping culture in the early-modern period is taken as a historiographic master narrative. The interplay of images with recording instruments and practices is also covered, before a summary of roughly two dozen crucial insights on early “visual studies.” Finally, the question of where the “visual turn” took the wrong turn is raised. It is from this point that the following chapters take off in developing the author’s own course.Less

The Convergence of Popular Music-Film: Zhang Yimou-Zhao Jiping and Spectacles of Sound

Ying Xiao

in China in the Mix: Cinema, Sound, and Popular Culture in the Age of Globalization

This chapter revisits Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (1987) and highlights the film’s innovative employments of sound as metaphor and spectacle that speak to the larger issues of gender, sexuality, ... More

This chapter revisits Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (1987) and highlights the film’s innovative employments of sound as metaphor and spectacle that speak to the larger issues of gender, sexuality, national identity, and human nature. As a formal analysis of the film and its indigenous songs and musical themes exhibits, Zhang Yimou and Zhao Jiping’s idiosyncratic, legendary collaboration and superlative synthesization of image-music-text have not only created an extraordinary spectacle that few other films could match, but have also sparked a new trend of cross-production and cross-fertilization between popular music and film since the late 1980s.Less

Faith Ringgold’s Story Quilts: “All Things American in America Are about Race”

Hertha D. Sweet Wong

in Picturing Identity: Contemporary American Autobiography in Image and Text

African American artist Faith Ringgold’s oversized story quilts are painted and stitched image-text narratives on fabric intended to be hung on art gallery walls. In all her work she thematizes race ... More

African American artist Faith Ringgold’s oversized story quilts are painted and stitched image-text narratives on fabric intended to be hung on art gallery walls. In all her work she thematizes race and gender, part of her project to revise historical misrepresentations and generate more accurate depictions. This chapter discusses Ringgold’s various interventions in a long history of textual and visual domination, noting also Ringgold’s innovations: how quilt squares function simultaneously as individual images or texts and as part of the entire visual field. Each quilt square functions as a page, while a series of quilt squares can function also as a frame. The sets of relations between page and frame and between image and text are multiple and variable.Less

Out of This World: Seeing the Afterlife in the Somme le Roi

Mark Chinca

in Meditating Death in Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Writing: From Bonaventure to Luther

The chapter examines the earliest set of instructions in the vernacular for meditating on death and the afterlife. First included in a handbook of practical and pastoral theology dating from the ... More

The chapter examines the earliest set of instructions in the vernacular for meditating on death and the afterlife. First included in a handbook of practical and pastoral theology dating from the 1270s called the Miroir du Monde, these instructions achieved widespread diffusion through all classes of laypeople and clergy in the revised version of the Miroir by Friar Laurent d’Orléans, the Somme le Roi (1279). The instructions exhort readers to “go out of this world” once a day by imagining that they have died and their souls have gone first to hell, then to purgatory and paradise, in order to see what punishments and rewards await human beings in the next life. The chapter discusses the epistemology of meditative vision, and its background in Augustine’s theory of corporeal, spiritual, and intellectual vision; it examines how readers’ meditative visualization of the afterlife is facilitated by key metaphors of the text, sometimes accompanied by manuscript illustrations; it also describes the linguistic consequences of a daily implementation of the exercise.Less

Art Spiegelman’s Graphic Memoir Maus: “One Is Left with What Remains, the Ruins That Are Sifted Over Endlessly”

Hertha D. Sweet Wong

in Picturing Identity: Contemporary American Autobiography in Image and Text

Art Spiegelman places transgenerational trauma at the center of his autobiographical comics Maus, revealing how he attempts to understand his parents’ Holocaust experiences and to comprehend the ... More

Art Spiegelman places transgenerational trauma at the center of his autobiographical comics Maus, revealing how he attempts to understand his parents’ Holocaust experiences and to comprehend the effects of that legacy that has been passed on to him. He depicts the challenges of extracting a coherent story from his father and shaping it into his book, of attempting to comprehend the haunting absence left by his mother’s suicide and the destruction of her journals, and of trying to represent what has been deemed “unrepresentable.” This chapter presents a close reading of Maus, emphasizing Spiegelman’s cinematic style, use of telling detail, mastery of moving between past and present, use of text as image, strategic choices about when to reproduce photographs and when to draw them, and his multiple conclusions that emphasize the impossibility of closure.Less

Introduction: Gender, Genre, and Visuality: New Approaches to the Study of Periodicals

Shobna Nijhawan

in Hindi Publishing in Colonial Lucknow: Gender, Genre, and Visuality in the Creation of a Literary 'Canon'

This chapter discusses new approaches to the study of periodicals that include a consideration of paratexts, text–image relationships as well as horizontal and vertical ways of reading. It suggests ... More

This chapter discusses new approaches to the study of periodicals that include a consideration of paratexts, text–image relationships as well as horizontal and vertical ways of reading. It suggests that the periodical acts as both a source (from where to gather primary sources) and as a genre in its own right. Other themes addressed in the introduction are the commercialization of print in colonial India, the designation and creation of poetic and prose genres and ‘canons’ in the Hindi periodical Sudhā as well as the creation of specifically gendered spaces within a mainstream Hindi literary periodical. The introduction concludes with an overview of primary sources consulted in this monograph as well as a chapter overview.Less

“Scarcely a Brick to Be Seen”: Breaking Boundaries in “Kew Gardens” and “The Mark on the Wall”

Karina Jakubowicz

in Virginia Woolf and the World of Books

This chapter focuses on two of Woolf's short stories, how their narrative style is mirrored in their binding and the physical presentation of the text as both stories focus on visual image.

Spiti: some notes on the practice of documentary photography

Patrick Sutherland

in Beyond text?: Critical practices and sensory anthropology

Patrick Sutherland has been taking photographs in the Spiti desert mountain valley, located high in the Himalayas, for nearly 25 years. What was initially envisioned as a one-off photographic field ... More

Patrick Sutherland has been taking photographs in the Spiti desert mountain valley, located high in the Himalayas, for nearly 25 years. What was initially envisioned as a one-off photographic field trip has developed into an obsessive, long-term, documentary project that is continually shaped by the challenging and complex relationships he has developed with the local communities who live there. As Sutherland notes “The practice of documentary photography is rarely straightforward. It is seldom about mechanically recording the world” but is a process in which images emerge from uncontrolled, unpredictable and random encounters, and necessitates a collusion with the contingencies—as well as structures—of social life, social relations and the surrounding environment. Embracing photo elicitation and collaborative formal portraiture, Sutherland observes that each time he returns to the Spiti Valley his understanding of the landscape and the people who live there shifts slightly, as does the meaning and narrative structure of the archive.Less