Relational Designs In Literature And The Arts

This collection focuses on texts that address the other arts – from painting to photography, from the stage to the screen, and from avant-garde experiments to mass culture. Despite their diversity of object and approach, the essays in Relational Designs coalesce around the argument that representations are defined by relations and dynamics, rather than intrinsic features. This rationale is supported by the discourses and methodologies favoured by the book’s contributors: their approaches offer a cross section of the intellectual and critical environment of our time. The book illustrates the critical possibilities that derive from the broad range of modes of inquiry - poststructuralist criticism, gender studies, postcolonial studies, new historicism – that the book’s four sections bring to bear on a wealth of intermedial practices. But Relational Designs compounds such critical emphases with the voice of the practitioner: the book is rounded off by an interview in which a contemporary novelist discusses her attraction to the other arts in terms that extend the book’s insights and bridge the gap between academic discourse and artistic practice.

Picturing the Language of Images is a collection of thirty-three previously unpublished essays that explore the complex and ever-evolving interaction between the verbal and the visual. The uniqueness of this volume lies in its bringing together scholars from around the world to provide a broad synchronic and diachronic exploration of the relationship between text and image, as well as a reflection on the limits of representation through a re-thinking of the very acts of reading and viewing. While covering a variety of media—such as literature, painting, photography, film and comics—across time—from the 18th century to the 21st century—this collection also provides a special focus on the work of particular authors, such as A. S. Byatt, W. G. Sebald, and Art Spiegelman.

This book is about the role that the imperfect, the disquieting and the dystopian are currently playing in the construction of Irish identities. All the essays assess identity issues that require urgent examination, problematize canonical definitions of Irishness and, above all, look at the ways in which the artistic output of the country has been altered by the Celtic Tiger phenomenon and its subsequent demise. Recent narrative from Ireland, principally published in the twenty-first century and/or at the end of the 1990s, is dealt with extensively. The authors examined include Eavan Boland, Mary Rose Callaghan, Peter Cunningham, Emma Donoghue, Anne Enright, Emer Martin, Lia Mills, Paul Muldoon, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Bernard O’Donoghue, Peter Sirr and David Wheatley.

This commemorative volume offers a retrospective of the discipline as mirrored in the series Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft since its founding in 1993. Leading scholars examine issues of world literature, the history of ideas, gender studies, aesthetics and literary translation.

The Intermediality of Contemporary Visual Arts explores a range of topics within the field. The volume delves into the realm of intermediality within the visual arts. Each chapter explores a different aspect; from the evolution of Intermedial Studies over the past decades to the shifts in print typography and the emergence of 'cut-ups” within a context of resistance against conventions, the concept of Visual Music and its relation to pioneering filmmaking, visual representations of intimacy as they evolve from painting to other visual formats like comics, film, and television, and finally the transmedial potential of cultural symbols in virtual reality, all of which involve greater multimodal and emotional elements that enhance audience immersion. The volume closes by highlighting the need for a comprehensive approach to visual art education and pedagogical methods that foster creativity, emphasizing the intermedial aspects present in contemporary visual arts.

In their new monograph, Gender and Short Fiction: Women's Tales in Contemporary Britain, Jorge Sacido-Romero and Laura M Lojo-Rodriguez explain why artistically ambitious women writers continue turning to the short story, a genre that has not yet attained the degree of literary prestige and social recognition the novel has had in the modern period. In this timely volume, the editors endorse the view that the genre still retains its potential as a vehicle for the expression of female experience alternative to and/or critical with dominant patriarchal ideology present at the very onset of the development of the modern British short story at the turn of the nineteenth century.

This collection of essays responds to the intense interest that the relations between the discourses of literature (and other cultural practices) and those of science have obtained throughout various fields of study. Spanning a period between the mid-nineteenth century and the twenty-first century, the work collected here is firmly focused on the cultural significance of scientific discoveries and practices, and especially on the manifold representations of science and scientists in literature and the arts. Its four sections develop from an initial moment of dwindling indefiniteness of borders between literature and the sciences to the historical perception of an increasing divide between “the two cultures,” to use C.P. Snow’s influential expression, as well as calls for a form of convergence or “consilience” in Edward Wilson’s words. The final section turns to the medical sciences, a porous scientific discipline in relation to the humanities, which suggests that consilience can already be found partially in specific areas. As such, this collection contributes towards critically extending that integration through the discussion of key literary representations of science, its promises, and its problems.

In This Is Not a Copy, Kaja Marczewska identifies a characteristic 'copy-paste' tendency in contemporary culture-a shift in attitude that allows reproduction and plagiarizing to become a norm in cultural production. This inclination can be observed in literature and non-literary forms of writing at an unprecedented level, as experiments with text redefine the nature of creativity. Responding to these transformations, Marczewska argues that we must radically rethink our conceptions of artistic practice and proposes a move away from the familiar categories of copying and originality, creativity and plagiarism in favour of the notion of iteration. Developing the new concept of the Iterative Turn, This Is Not a Copy identifies and theorizes the turn toward ubiquitous iteration as a condition of text-based creative practices as they emerge in response to contemporary technologies. Conceiving of writing as iterative invites us to address a set of new, critical questions about contemporary culture. Combining discussion of literature, experimental and electronic writing, mainstream and independent publishing with debates in 20th- and 21st-century art, contemporary media culture, transforming technologies and copyright laws, This Is Not a Copy offers a timely and urgently needed argument, introducing a unique new perspective on practices that permeate our contemporary culture.