Liliane Louvel - The Pictorial Third: An Essay Into Intermedial Criticism

The Pictorial Third

The Pictorial Third: An Essay into Intermedial Criticism examines the extent to which poetry intertwines with painting and the visual at large, and studies the singular relationship established between language and image, observing the modalities and workings of what is termed intermedial transposition. By following a critical method of the close analysis of texts, the book examines to what extent the pictorial tool may be of help to analyse literary texts and thus enlarge and enrich literary criticism.

Examining the technical notions typical of the medium and its history, including perspective, framing, colour, anamorphosis, trompe-lil, Veronica veil, still life, portrait, figure, illusion, apparatus, genres, and styles, this volume presents a pragmatics of image-in-text and of the visual-in-text as an operative tool. This pictorial reading necessarily includes synaesthesia and the senses; it also functions as a reading event, or what happens to one when one unawares encounters a picture (be it present in the book or the object of an ekphrasis). Thus, the body is eventually given back a role to play. The sensitive approach has its own resonances, and the eye or the gaze sometimes sees double in such intermedially oriented texts. This volume proposes to identify the pictorial third as the phenomenon that can be apprehended in terms of effect or affect not only as a concept.

Dr. Liliane Louvel is Emerita Professor at the University of Poitiers, France, and the President of the European Society for the Study of English. She received the title of Chevalier dans lordre de la Lgion dHonneur, the highest National Order or award in France, in 2011. She has published numerous articles and books on the interrelationship between word and image, including: Lil du texte (Toulouse PUM, 1998), The Picture of Dorian Gray, Le double miroir de lart (Ellipses, 2000), Texte/image, images lire et textes voir (Rennes PUR, 2002), Le tiers pictural (PUR, 2010) and Poetics of the Iconotext, Translation by Laurence Petit, edited by Karen Jacobs (Ashgate, July 2011).

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The Pictorial Third
An Essay into Intermedial Criticism
Liliane Louvel
Edited and Translated by Angeliki Tseti

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First published 2018
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ISBN: 978-1-138-59901-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-48599-2 (ebk)

Translated from the original French by Angeliki Tseti When the official French to English translation wasnt available, the author has used their own

Typeset in Sabon
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Professor Julie Leblanc

The complex network of relationships woven between literary texts from various historical, linguistic, cultural contexts and various forms of images (painted, drawn, photographic, cinematic, ekphrasis) have been the object of many fields of inquiry: semiotics, rhetoric, narratology, art history, cinematographic studies, theories of perception, genetic criticism, and numerous forms of textual analysis. The multidisciplinary nature of word and image studies requires that we consider the modalities which are at play in the construction of these various forms of intermedial transpositions. The main objective of Pictorial Third is to construct a theoretical and analytical framework where word/image relationships can be treated in a more reconciliatory, less hierarchal fashion, more like a dialectic. The Pictorial Third argues for an intellectual exchange between the interacting forces at play in the multidisciplinary study of word and image relationships. What emerges from Louvels in-depth theoretical study and analytical endeavors is a certain willingness to treat language and images as two partners who sometimes compete with one another, complement each other, mistrust one another while looking at collaborating with one another (J. Marizot, Interfaces: text and image, p. 14).

One of the great assets of Louvels monograph is her conceptual and methodological presentations of numerous questions related to word and image interactions. She is an accomplished pedagogue, and her presentation of ancient and modern concepts and their application to literary and visual media are done with precision and continuously display a sensitivity towards readers who may wish to use her conceptualisation of word/image interactions for the analysis of other literary corpuss and visual media. In this long-awaited English translation of Le Tiers pictural. Pour une critique intermediale (PURennes, 2010), Liliane Louvel pursues and expands on her theorisation and analysis of various forms of word and image interactions which were the focus of previous monographs: Lil du texte, texte et image dans la littrature anglophone (1998), The Picture of Dorian Gray, Le double visage de lart (2000), Texte/image, Images lire textes voir (2002), Poetics of the Iconotext (translated by Laurence Petit and edited by Karen Jacobs [2011]). Her theoretical and analytical rigour is also displayed in numerous edited/co-edited volumes focused on the interdisciplinary nature of word and image studies: La licorne, Like Painting, Texte et image dans la littrature anglophone, EJES: The Visual and the Written, La rticence: Texte/image, La licorne: Lillisible, Littrature et photographie, Lintensit: forme et rgimes dintensit. These numerous publications have become fundamental texts for researchers eager to explore the multidimensional, interdisciplinary, multilingual, and multicultural nature of word and image relationships. With the publication of the Poetics of the Iconotext and this latest translation of her extremely well-reviewed Le Tiers Pictural, Louvel initiates another dialogue between French and Anglophone traditions on the complex intersections of text and image relationships. Written with the same theoretical discipline, analytical sensitivity, and interdisciplinary demeanour adopted in her other monographs, The Pictorial Third is an expansion of previous publications. She adopts a detailed taxonomic demeanor to study the modalities which underlie various forms of intermedial transpositions. The conceptual and methodological approaches explored by Louvel allow her to propose a typology of image/text relationships, to develop methodologies for the visual analysis of literary texts, and to expand upon existing phenomenologies of reading constructed to take into account the complexities of visually oriented texts. Her typology of texts graded by their degree of visual saturation and her proposed categorisation of various textual subgenres constructed around the criteria of pictorial density represents a rich and innovative way to analyse the heterogeneity of word and image relationships. To explore the modalities of various forms of intermedial transpositions, Louvel ventures into a thorough historical and theoretical analysis of word/image relationships which takes her from a detailed analysis of the art of transposing images into words, words into images, to an intermedial poetics of word/image interactions (poetics of the pictorial) and its relationship to pictorial allusions, iconotexts, ekphrasis, synaesthesia, performativity, and phenomenology. The study of intermedial transpositions leads Louvel to consider numerous questions which she attempts to answer throughout the Pictorial Third: what are the pragmatic, aesthetic, and poetic specificities of the word/image relationships within literary texts; which functions does the image-in-text fulfil, how are pictorial and interpictorial references constructed, are they visual modulations, do they serve as an aesthetic enhancement, do they enlighten, complement, complicate the reading process; how does description, ekphrasis, pictorial allusions, and iconographic representations differ from one another on the hermeneutical level; what are the cultural ramifications of a literary text that introduces a textual or iconographic pictorial representation (photograph, painting, drawings, etc.); how does the introduction of an image affect the literary texts narrative and discursive form and content; should concepts of alterity, hybridity, and plurality be referenced in the study of word and image relationships; can a typology of the multiple effects created by the pictorial third be conceived by taking into account generic considerations, the degree of visual saturation/pictorial density, etc. The intermedial critical typology introduced at the end of