Informed by considerations of material culture, literary criticism has devoted some attention to the paratext. For example, questions about how cover art and dust jackets can generate particular readings or construct an implied reader have been raised. Studies which deal with the relation between illustration and verbal artefact are appearing in such journals as Word and Image.
All is well when the paratext is physically proximate to the described text or object. However, modern marketing practices pose challenges for the construction of archives and the building of library collections. The generation of discursive ephemera has exploded. The discourse that takes up a given cultural artefact (or event) is dispersed. Not just in time and place but also across media.
This course investigates some of the challenges of this cultural condition. Through an attentive case study of an object of an obscenity trial, the same event/artefact reproduced as an anthology piece and as an intertext for other cultural productions, we will interrogate the current status of cross-modal relations, that is the relations between the sister arts.
The text is Allen Ginsberg's Howl and two musical adaptations of the poem or part of the poem. One adaptation is spell by Oliver Ray sung by Patti Smith on peace and noise (Arista, 1997). The other is by Lee Hyla and performed by the Kronos Quartet (Nonesuch, 1996). The case study will also include an analysis of liner notes and accompanying artwork.
This is an ideal case for those interested in revisiting the problem of cross-model translation as figured in the classical division of the arts (Lessing) and refigured in influential media theory (McLuhan). This case also serves well for an excursion through rhetorical theory and an examination of the problematic of reporting about what is heard or about what is seen in a medium capable of appealing to sight and to sound. Finally, it is also the perfect case to assess the possibilities of total translation (Rothenberg) and back translantion.
Bal, Mieke. Reading "Rembrandt": beyond the word-image opposition:
the Northrup Frye Lectures in Literary Theory (Cambridge; New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
in Illuminations trans. Harry Zohn
(New York: Shocken Books, 1969).
Braider, Christopher. Refiguring the real:
picture and modernity in word and image, 1400-1700
(Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1993).
Caws, Mary Ann. The art of interference : stressed readings in
verbal and visual texts (Cambridge: Polity Press in association
with B. Blackwell, 1989).
Collins, Christopher. The Poetics of the Mind's Eye: Literature and the Psychology of Imagination (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).
Devereux, George. "Ethnopsychological Aspects of the Terms 'Deaf' and 'Dumb'" in Howes, 1991.
Drucker, Johanna. The dual muse: the writer as artist, the artist
as writer (St. Louis, Mo.: Washington University Gallery of Art: 1997).
Drucker, Johanna. The visible word: experimental typography and
modern art, 1909-1923 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press,1994).
Frank, Joseph. "Spatial Form in Modern Literature" rpt in The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1963).
Hagstrum, Jean H. Eros and Vision: The Restoration to Romanticism
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1989).
Hagstrum, Jean H. The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1958).
Hines, Thomas Jensen. Collaborative
form: studies in the relations of the arts (Kent, Ohio : Kent State University Press, 1991).
Howes, David, ed. The Varieties
of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991).
Jensen, H. James. Signs and meaning in eighteenth-century art : epistemology, rhetoric, painting, poesy, music (New York : Peter Lang, 1997).
Krieger, Murray. Ekphrasis : the illusion of the natural sign (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
Lessing, G. E. "Laocoon, or On the Limits of Painting and Poetry" in German Aestheitc and Literary Criticism ed. H.B. Nisbet.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
Martin, Jay. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in
Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1993).
McLuhan, Marshall. Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).
Mitchell, WJ.T. Iconology : image, text, ideology
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture theory : essays on verbal and visual representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Mowitt, John. Text: The Geneology of an Antidisciplinary
Object (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1992).
Mukarovsky, Jan. Structure, Sign, and Function trans. John Burbank and Peter Steiner. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978).
Nicholson, Graeme. Seeing and Reading (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1984).
Pearce, Lynne. Woman, Image, Text: Readings in Pre-Raphaelite Art
and Literature (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press,
1991).
Rothenberg, Jerome. Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia and Oceania (New York: Doubleday, 1968).
Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana Unveristy Press, 1988).
Shapiro, H.A. Myth into Art: Poet and Painter in Classical Greece (New York; London: Routledge, 1994).
Smitten, Jeffrey R. and Ann Daghistany. Spatial Form in Narrative (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1981).
Steiner, Wendy. The colors of rhetoric: problems in the relation
between modern literature and painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
Stewart, Susan. Nonsense, aspects of intertextuality in folklore and
literature (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press,
1979).