«Letteratura e Letterature», 21, 2027
Call for Papers: Literature and the Visual Arts: Writing and / as Image
L’écriture est une image et le problème de ses rapports avec les autres types d’images est aussi ancien qu’elle-même, mais avec le développement de l’imprimerie, l’énorme multiplication de l’image écrite a provoqué une veritable occultation de la conscience occidentale à cet égard.
Writing is an image and the issue of its relations with other kinds of images is as old as writing but, after the development of printing, the enormous multiplication of written images has provoked a veritable occultation of the awareness on this subject in Western psyche. (M. Butor)
When Michel Butor made this remark — in the foreword to the 1973 edition of Apollinaire’s Calligrammes — the French author could not foresee the dizzying development of multimedia technologies that, in recent years, further expanded, enriched, and radically changed the relationships between writings and images. For the most part, Butor’s observations referred to the avant-garde experimentations of the 20th century. Nevertheless, something similar is happening in our current historical moment, in which several traditional guardrails between different semiotic realms appear more and more permeable, breaking down word / image binaries.
On the one hand, it is perhaps obvious to remember the ancient roots of the scholarship on the shifting thresholds between words, writings, and visions. Ekphrasis, as Butor would probably have it, is as old as literature itself. It is likely that both literature and ekphrasis appeared simultaneously, as creative and pedagogical practices, thousands of years ago. Anthropological and archeological approaches are useful, if one wants to investigate the rather obscure beginnings of both literature and ekphrasis. On the other hand, only a few other historical periods could compete with the present. Almost daily, we witness the frailty of many conventional labels that previous generations applied to what is written, read, and heard. It is a pervasive communicative syncretism: iconographies and iconologies, literary genres and rhetorical strategies, communicative styles and artistic traditions, horizons of expectations and intellectual communities revise the understanding of their paradigms, even those that looked relatively stable. The next issue of «Letteratura e Letterature» will offer the opportunity to assess and debate the most thought-provoking critical positions on the encounters between literature, visual, and plastic arts. Ideally, recent theoretical trends and past critical commentaries will reveal their cross-fertilizations and, in many cases, common genealogies.
«Letteratura e Letterature» welcomes contributions that explore old and new exchanges between the verbal and the visual arts, in individual authors and specific texts and / or in genres, schools, and tendencies: we are interested in texts case studies, broader theoretical framings, and their possible dialogues. We look forward to selecting essays that examine aesthetic, ideologic, and cultural borders and hierarchies between visual, plastic, verbal, and aural fields. We encourage innovative takes on the analogies, differences, correlations, and reconfigurations between verbal and visual texts.
Topics include but are not limited to:
- current theories of ekphrasis and contemporary critical debate on the relations between word-based and image-based works, seeing and reading;
- connections between literature and pictorial, sculptural, and filmic images, in light of critical constellations that coalesce hermeneutics, anthropology, art history, and history of literary criticism in the present and in the past;
- influence of recent multimedia, digital, audiovisual technology on narrative, playwriting, poetry, fiction and non-fiction texts; inter-artistic collaborations and their transformations in parallel with technological advancements;
- intermedial and transnational practices and verbo-visual creations in the Internet; resonance of interlinguistic and intersemiotic translations, in particular in literary works;
- ekphrasis and contemporary iconotexts in World Literature, mass media, graphic novels, advertisement, propaganda; connections of these forms with literature, possible development or deconstruction of the notion of literary canon;
- fast mutations in social, ecological, medical, geopolitical, post and neo-colonial realities during the last decades and how they affect, model, and dislocate interactions between word and image, for example in narrative, poetic, and theatrical representations of bodies, violence, migrations, social exchanges, gender identities, and climate change.
Please send abstract and short bio (no more than 300 words total) by January 15th, 2026, to Stefano Ballerio (stefano.ballerio@unimi.it), Giuseppe Carrara (giuseppe.carrara@unimi.it), and Andrea Mirabile (andrea.mirabile@vanderbilt.edu). We will accept contributions in English, French, and Italian.
We will provide feedback by March 1st. If accepted, send your essay (no more than 6.000 words, i.e. 40.000 characters with spaces) by September 15th. Publication of «Letteratura e Letterature» 21 forthcoming March-April 2027.