Call for papers nº 25 — Literature and Visual Arts: between the readable and the visible.
In this Criação & Crítica issue, our purpose is to think the relationship between literature and visual arts, beyond exclusively comparative matters. Which aspects of this “absolutely essential link”, according to Michel Butor (1963), can we still explore in artistic and literary creations?
This discussion dates back to twenty-four centuries in Western’s literary and artistic productions. Plutarch (46 – 125) had already attested that Simonides of Ceos (556 – 468 BC), six centuries before, had called painting mute poetry, and poetry, a talking painting. This conception on the correspondence between poetry and painting will outlast throughout centuries until nowadays in its an ever-changing shape, with regards to Literature and Visual Arts.
Altogether with the radical deterritorialization in disciplinary fields of studies related to artistic and literary practices in the 20th century, a challenging amount of new elements — that are far from reaching a consensus on how they should be approached — have been launched in the core of the ancient debate. Added to the discussion of a possible end of literature that has been fuelled by new literary practices presented as post-literature, neo-literature, “literature outside the book”, “literatura de exposição” or even, “plastic literature”.
A profusion of new fields and categories such as inter-art, hybridization, crossroads, crossbreeding, inter-semiotic, trans-aesthetic, trans-creation, mixed media, trans-media, pluri-, multi-, intermediality, etc., transforms what seems to be a simple terminological question into a task that is not clear at all.
Much has been written on pictorial, descriptive and expositional elements in Literature, as well as, poetic, rhetorical or narrative aspects of Visual Arts. The implications of this exchanges enabled highly prolific reflections in the French context in the 19th century, in which writers and painters were in constant and intense conversation regarding literary and painting practices, at that point, considered to be “art sisters”. What else can still be said about Balzac’s fictional paintings by Frenhofer and Probus in The Unknown Masterpiece? Or about Claude Lantier’s paintings in Zola’s L’Œuvre? Or even the Proust’s imaginary works of art
from In Search of Lost Time, that not only compose a narrative, but it is directly connected with the novel’s structure, designed to be a cathedral, in clear allusion to Monet’s series about Rouen’s cathedral, painted between 1892 e 1894. The fog effect portrayed in the painting covering the building and slowly unveiling was incorporated into Proust’s work.
If the picto-poetics of Apollinaire’s Calligrammes approaches text-image syncretized through a literary medium, in other words, the book, how should we consider Breton’s poem-object or Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, in which the statement “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” is infiltrated into a strictly pictorial space? These matters, visited by Foucault’s celebrated work named after the same words from Magritte’s painting, still feed the debate, today enlarged by many other questions surrounding the so-called “literary temptation of contemporary art”. Bringing up illustrated books, such as Odilon Moraes and Bruno Munari’s works, or Júlio Plaza’s and Michel Butor’s artistic books, some of Nuno Ramos’ and Élida Tessler’s works, among many others, as we could make an inventory with the most dissimilar examples of how each artist or writer find their own ways to enhance the co-implication between verbal and visual, of reading and of seeing. Understanding here the intellective practices producing meaning as the specificity of reading and the perceptive practice
producing sensations as the specificity of seeing.
We look forward to contributions reflecting upon literary writing in dialogue with the following mediums: drawing, engraving, painting, sculpture, photography, performance, art installation, conceptual art, art books, illustration, graffiti and possible artistic-literary developments aroused by this proximity.
Contributions must be submitted through the journal’s website, following its guidelines, until
August 30, 2019.
