William Blake: The Eighteenth- century Genius of Intermediality as a Character in Mad Girl’s Love Song.

Mail Marques De Azevedo

doi:10.35572/rlr.v9i3.1849

Abstract

The focal point of this work is the appropriation of William Blake’s persona as a character in the novel Mad Girl's Love Song , by the Indian post-colonial writer Rukmini Bhaya Nair. We discuss initially, the intermedial character of Blake's work, as a poet and painter, with emphasis on his copper engraving technique, the so-called illuminated impression, which constitutes the differential feature of his art. From the concept of remediation of previous media explained by Bolter and Grusin, Blake's work is seen as an eighteenth-century example of the immediacy and hypermediacy that characterize today's digital media. Leo Hoek's concepts of simultaneity and successiveness in intersemiotic translation are used to analyze the phases of production and reception of the text-image dyad The relationship between Bhaya Nair's writing and the Western literary canon is seen not only as the appropriation of its themes, characters and writing techniques but as an instrument of protest against the subaltern position of the post-colonial subject. KEYWORDS: Blake. Appropriation. Illuminated printing. Rukmini Bhaya Nair.

Highlights

Notable painter and engraver, William Blake (1757-1827) developed the prophetic thought of a visionary in his dazzling verse
An artificer rather than poet at the age of 15, Blake was apprenticed to the engraver James Basire, who taught the young man the fundamentals of his art
Both William Blake’s intermedial art and the role of Blake-as-character in a post-independence Indian novel are the objects of this work, plus the appropriation of the Western literary canon by a postcolonial subject

Summary

Introduction

William Blake (1757-1827) developed the prophetic thought of a visionary in his dazzling verse. Both William Blake’s intermedial art and the role of Blake-as-character in a post-independence Indian novel are the objects of this work, plus the appropriation of the Western literary canon by a postcolonial subject. The joint effect of the reunion of multiple types of media is the immediate immersion of the receiver into the context of the experience It happens both in today’s technology-dominated world, when a viewer can be part of a hang-glider flight live on a screen, as well as in the conjunction of word and image in the engravings of the late eighteenth-century genius of intermediality. 24, my translation).The intermedial character of Blake's association of written verse and image comes from the crossing of boundaries implicit in the prefix inter that corresponds to the location of phenomena in the space between one media and another. Bhaya Nair manages both to appropriate Blake’s style in her narrative and to make use of his lyrics and prophetic books as a libel against the traumatic consequences of colonialism

William Blake’s intermedial art

William Blake: a character in the twenty-first-century postcolonial novel