Text into Image: Image into Text

Abstract

Morrison, Jeff, and Florian Krobb, eds. into Image: Image into Text. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997. 353 pp. $ 109.00 This book consists of proceedings of Interdisciplinary Bicentenary Conference held at St. Patrick's College Maynoon, The National University of Ireland, in September 1995. The wide range of topics and interdisciplinarity of these essays are not bewildering, fear editors voice in their brief introduction. They are specific investigations written from viewpoints of German Studies, French Studies, English Studies, Art History, and Film Studies, which makes collection into mosaic of exciting vignettes. Although introduction does not offer much in way of an explicit research goal or show how thirty five essays are interrelated, editors give some hints as to how this might be done by raising such questions as: Is debate within German literary circles of particular value of Laocoon statue as work of art in its own right and as model for literary enterprises imaginable without parallel aesthetic debates between French and English literature? Can anyone currently working on theoretical treatment of relationship between literature and visual arts-in whatever language-seriously afford to overlook contribution made by Derrida (12)? To varying degrees, all essays, which are of widely differing quality, emphasize interdependence of literature and visual arts. While some of them are truly thought provoking and offer remarkable new insights, others ignore or confuse historical facts and bypass vast amount of recent scholarship on visual culture, field that has gained even more momentum since conference. The editors of this book seem to take for granted such terms as and text and they primarily limit debate to influence studies. The book consists of three sections. The first one, titled Image to / From to Image, includes only few theoretically stimulating contributions, such as Brian Cosgrove, Murray Krieger: Ekphrasis as Spatial Form, Ekphrasis as Mimesis, which interrogates notion of natural sign; and one by Kristy Fergusson, Diderot in Logosphere, which challenges any concept of a happy co-existence between word and and reminds us of Tournier's fear of absence of language in presence of an image and of Diderot's acknowledgment of the resolute silence of (34). Other essays in this section document impact of visual art on narrative, for example, those by David Scott, Text as Image in Nineteenth-Century French Literature: Images of Watteau into Texts by Banville and Verlaine; Francesca Counihan, Marguerite Yourcenar rediscovers Rembrandt; and Anca Cristofovici, Whisteljacket-the Embedded Image: George Stubbs remembered by John Hawkes. …