Reading Images and Seeing Words

Alan English and Rosalind Silvester eds., Reading Images and Seeing Words, Amsterdam/New York, Rodopi, 2004, 188 p., 40 euros/50 US$. 

The simultaneously tautological and oxymoronic nature of word / image relations has become a subject of massive debate in the post-modern period. This is not only because of the increasing predominance of word / image messages within our modern media-saturated culture, but also because intellectual disciplines are becoming increasingly sensitized to the essentially hybrid nature of the way we construct meaning in the world. The essays in this volume offer an exemplary insight into both aspects of this phenomenon. Focussing on both traditional and modern media (theatre, fiction, poetry, graphic art, cinema), the essays of Reading Images and Seeing Words are deeply concerned to show how it is according to signifying codes (rhetoric, poetics, metaphor), that meaning and knowledge are produced. Not the least value of this collection is the insight it gives into the multiple models of word / image interaction and the rich ambiguity of the tautological and oxymoronic relations they embody. 

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

List of Contributors

David SCOTT: Preface

1. Rosalind SILVESTER & Alan ENGLISH: Introduction

I. - READING IMAGES

2. Nina PARISH: Henri Michaux: Destruction of the Book Form and Creation of the Book-Object

3. Nicola CREIGHTON: The Revolution of the Word Follows the Revolution of the Eye: Carl Einstein and Cubism
in Image and Text

4. Maria WALSH: Narrative Duration: Tacita Dean's Disappearance at Sea

5. Guillaume THOUROUDE: Une ligne: Proust... Beckett... Deleuze. L'image épuisante

6. Massimo LEONE: Words, Images and Knots

II - SEEING WORDS

7. Rosalind SILVESTER: Seeing is Perceiving: Sartre's Language of Phenomenology

8. Alan ENGLISH: Verlaine: Blurred Images and Ambiguous Text

9. David DENBY: Gesture, Point of View and Proto-cinema in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables

10. Nicolas FÈVE: Rhétorique de la photographie dans l'autobiographie contemporaine: Des Histoires vraies de Sophie Calle

11. Sarah CANT: Image, Word, Absence and Silence in Pennac's Monsieur Malaussène

12. Nicolas WANLIN: Description as the Manifestation of Absence: Analysis of Pictoriality in Gaspard de la nuit by Aloysius Bertrand