Literature Through Art

Excerpt from Literature Through Art: A New Approach to French Literature To the literary historian, a history of French literature in which art is used as the key to a better and deeper understanding of literature will be of primary concern. The art historian, on the other hand, will take the 0p posite view wishing to see art elucidated by other forms of expression. To us the paramount problem is the comparative analysis and appreciation of texts and pictures in their details. For this purpose the historian must also be a philologist and a critic, i.e. One who can analyze both texts and pictures with correctness and taste. Therefore philologist and critic must be under stood here in a double sense; first, factually, in regard to interpretation and iconography and second, formally, in regard to stylistics and formal de scription. From a methodological point of view, philology is involved in yet an other sense. It is gratifying to see that the text-bound analytical, and stylistic method in literary history as used here, and as Opposed to the traditionally vague, synthetic, and persuasive method, finds even on the non-compara tive level enthusiastic support from the analysts of literary style. It is they who have called for a change in the way of literary history. The method of explication de textes has been used for some years for historical purposes in the sense that the new literary history in the making is considered to be composed of single layers of interpreted texts as encountered in successive epochs. It is this method that is used here on a comparative basis, the ex plications de textes having been supplemented by the explications de tableaux. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The eleven chapters in this international volume draw on a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to focus our attention on medieval and early modern things (ca. 700–1600). The range of things includes actual objects (the Altenburg Crucifixion, a copy of Hieronymus Brunschwig’s Liber de arte distillandi, a pilgrim’s letter), imagined objects (a prayed cloak for the Virgin Mary), and narrative objects in texts (the Alliterative Morte Arthure, the Ordene de Chevalerie, Hartmann von Aue’s Erec, Heinrich of Neustadt’s Apollonius of Tyre, Luís de Camões’s Os Lusíadas, and the vita of Saint Guthlac). Each in its own way, the papers consider how things do what they do in texts and art, often foregrounding the intersection between the material and the immaterial by exploring such questions as how things act, how they express power, and how texts and images represent them. Medieval and early modern things are repeatedly shown to be more than symbolic or passive, they are agentive and determinative in both their intra- and extradiegetic worlds. The things that are addressed in this volume are varied and are embedded, or entangled, in different contexts and societies, and yet they share a concerted engagement in human life.

Fascination with quotidian experience in modern art, literature, and philosophy promotes ecstatic forms of reflection on the very structure of the everyday world. Gosetti-Ferencei examines the ways in which modern art and literature enable a study of how we experience quotidian life. She shows that modernism, while exhibiting many strands of development, can be understood by investigating how its attentions to perception and expectation, to the common quality of things, or to childhood play gives way to experiences of ecstasis&—the stepping outside of the ordinary familiarity of the world. While phenomenology grounds this study (through Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Bachelard), what makes this book more than a treatise on phenomenological aesthetics is the way in which modernity itself is examined in its relation to the quotidian. Through the works of artists and writers such as Benjamin, C&ézanne, Frost, Klee, Newman, Pollock, Ponge, Proust, Rilke, Robbe-Grillet, Rothko, Sartre, and Twombly, the world of quotidian life can be seen to harbor a latent ecstasis. The breakdown of the quotidian through and after modernism then becomes an urgent question for understanding art and literature in its capacity to further human experience, and it points to the limits of phenomenological explications of the everyday.

In this compilation, the authors suggest a temporal model interpretation for the stele from the Scythian Senior Trekhbratnyi barrow (IVIII centuries BC). The specific and unusual iconographical features of the stele are unknown in Bosporan Kingdom funerary art, however it can be interpreted not only as containing two layers but also temporal stages, which recreate consecutive phases of the Scythian eschatological myth, and Iranian eschatological beliefs in general. In the following chapter, the authors propose that since we are visually and aurally minded, it is worth inquiring into how, in Cervantes and Shakespeare, the eye and the ear are used and abused by the characters; how their interaction affects them as hearers and beholders who respond to what is happening by such processes as sympathy or antagonism; and how they make characters react in one way or another, as their actions and emotions depend on what they hear and see. Afterwards, the authors propose to explore the new linguistic context of Morocco in the midst of change, through the analysis of selected novels and theatre productions, and to discuss how current debates on language are challenging traditional ideas of identity and nationhood in the country. This collection also includes an analysis of Shakespeare in The Netherlands in education, translation, and performance, highlighting the specific impact of language, theatre system, and specific cultural conditions on performing Shakespeare on the Dutch stage. In doing so, the authors fill a gap in the literature on Shakespeare in The Netherlands.

Praxis-basierte Forschung im Bereich der Literatur.016 Autorinnen und Autoren aus neun europäischen Ländern umreißen ein neues Feld an der Schnittstelle von Belletristik und Künstlerischer Forschung.00Noch partizipiert die Literatur kaum am Diskurs der Künstlerischen Forschung, der vor allem im Rahmen von Kunsthochschulen prominent geführt wird. Einzelne Schriftstellerinnen und Forscher jedoch loten in unterschiedlicher Weise die Verbindungen von künstlerischer Schreibpraxis mit wissenschaftlicher Forschung aus. Sie geben Einblicke in ihre Arbeitsweisen und analysieren Fallbeispiele: Welche methodologischen Voraussetzungen, welche Verfahrensweisen und Fragestellungen könnten eine zukünftige praxis-basierte Literaturforschung auszeichnen?

The classic study of the timeless relationship between literature and the visual arts In his search for a common link between literature and the visual arts, Mario Praz draws on the abundant evidence of mutual understanding and correspondence they have long shared. Praz explains that within literature, each epoch has “its peculiar handwriting or handwritings, which, if one could interpret them, would reveal a character, even a physical appearance,” and while these characteristics belong to the general style of a given period, the personality of the writer does not fail to pierce through. Praz contends that something similar occurs in art. He shows how the likeness between the arts within various periods of history can ultimately be traced to structural similarities that arise out of the characteristic way in which the people of a certain epoch see and memorize facts aesthetically. Mnemosyne, at once the goddess of memory and the mother of the muses, presides over this view of the arts. In illustrating her influence, Praz ranges widely through Western sources, providing an incomparable tour of the literary and pictorial arts.

The first volume of the new series Education, Culture, and Society sheds light on Indigenous justice perspectives in Indigenous literature and art. Decolonizing education, culture, and society is the revolutionary political pulse of this book aimed at educational reform and comprehensive change.

Emphasizing the diversity of twentieth-century collage practices, Rona Cran's book explores the role that it played in the work of Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O'Hara, and Bob Dylan. For all four, collage was an important creative catalyst, employed cathartically, aggressively, and experimentally. Collage's catalytic effect, Cran argues, enabled each to overcome a potentially destabilizing crisis in representation. Cornell, convinced that he was an artist and yet hampered by his inability to draw or paint, used collage to gain access to the art world and to show what he was capable of given the right medium. Burroughs' formal problems with linear composition were turned to his advantage by collage, which enabled him to move beyond narrative and chronological requirement. O'Hara used collage to navigate an effective path between plastic art and literature, and to choose the facets of each which best suited his compositional style. Bob Dylan's self-conscious application of collage techniques elevated his brand of rock-and-roll to a level of heightened aestheticism. Throughout her book, Cran shows that to delineate collage stringently as one thing or another is to severely limit our understanding of the work of the artists and writers who came to use it in non-traditional ways.