Literary Texts & the Arts: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Literary Texts & the Arts’s sixteen essays explore numerous aspects of both the theoretical and applied relationships between textuality in the form of novels, plays, and poems and visuality in the form of the photographic, artistic, or cinematic image. Topics range from the linguistic and artistic attempts to express the inexpressible or the transcendent in notions of the sublime, where the essence of phenomena eludes the communicative and epistemological capacity of words and images, to postmodern representations of time and cinematic adaptations of literary texts. The photographic image is also examined as autonomous language that stands in opposition to the verbal and the written text and as a complementary mode that shares some communicative structures and modalities with the word while not being reducible to it. The thread that runs through all of the essays is the assertion of the constructive or power of the word (spoken, recited, written) and the image (representational, mimetic, nonrepresentational) to create meanings as well as the implication that, somehow, that capacity is partial because it is limited by the inherent nature of the means of expression.