Word Painting Research Articles

Feature Separation and Fusion to Optimise the Migration Model of Mural Painting Style in Tombs

Tomb murals are different from cave temple murals and temple murals, as they are underground cultural relics, their painting style is unique, solemn, and austere, and the performance image is characterised by simple colours, low contrast, and fewer survivors. During the digital restoration process, it is important to have sufficient reference samples to ensure the accuracy of the restoration. In addition, the style of mural paintings in the tombs varies greatly from other styles of murals and types of word paintings. Therefore, learning the unique artistic style of tomb murals, providing stylistically consistent training samples for digital restoration, and overcoming the problems of dim lighting and complex surface granularity of tomb murals are all necessary for research. This paper proposes a generative adversarial network algorithm that separates and fuses style features to enhance the generative network’s ability to acquire image information. The algorithm extracts underlying and surface style feature details of the image to be tested and conducts fusion generation experiments. The generative network’s parsing layer modifies the input noise tensor and optimises the corresponding weights to prevent misalignment between drawing lines and fresco cracks. Finally, to optimise the fresco generation effect, we add the corresponding loss function in the discriminator. The tomb murals dataset was established for experiments and tests, and quantitatively and qualitatively analysed with other style migration models, and SSIM, FID, LPIPS and NIQE were used as evaluation indexes. The results were 0.97, 269.579, 0.425 and 3.250, respectively, and the effect of style migration of this paper’s method was significantly higher than that of the control group model.

The role of verbal painting in Leonid Leonov’s novel “Russian Forest”

L.M. Leonov dreamed of becoming an artist and the painter’s talent was embodied in his prose. His landscapes, portraits, portraits against the background of a forest in the tradition of, for example, M.V. Nesterov play an important role in the internal form of his works. The novel “Russian Forest” is indicative in this regard. The purpose of the study is to explain the functions of pictorial allusions and ekphrasis in this novel. The following tasks are solved: identify the most common allusions and ekphrasis in the paintings of Russian artists, which were popular at the time of Leonov painting training, and were subsequently paraphrased in the novel; explain the functions of recognizable paintings by masters of fine art in word painting; argue for the special role of pictorial ekphrasis in the formation of the genre diversity of the novel. As a result, some essential features of the writer’s individual style in the novel under study are clarified: the prose writer’s special attention to the descriptive component of the work makes it possible to assert that his appeal to analogies with fine art is deliberate, since they contribute to the creation of not just a scientific-production or abstract-philosophical novel, but builds a whole series of genre lines, which are supported by recognizable pictorial visualization, on the one hand, and, on the other, forms a deep socio-psychological and lyrical plan of the work. Comparisons of specific paintings transformed into ekphrasis in prose provide scientists with rich material for drawing conclusions about the synthesis of painting and prose.

Recent Research in Singing

This “Recent Research in Singing” article chronicles four recent academic documents authored during academic year 2023. Dissertations by Brandon W. Banks, “Uncovering Word Painting and Motivic Structures Within Paul Hindemith’s Das Marienleben;” Sarah Kathryn Curtis, “I’m a Stranger Here Myself: An Analysis of a Selection of Kurt Weill’s Vocal Music;” Blythe Reed-Banks, “The Effect of Menstruation on the Upper Vocal Registers of Female Voices;” and a thesis by Christina Kayleen Hoss, “Classical and Musical Theater Vocal Pedagogy for Female Collegiate Singers: An Observation and Study.” Each includes a complete bibliographic citation and an Author/ProQuest abstract.

The Sticky Riff: Quantifying the Melodic Identities of Medieval Modes

Andrew Hughes' Late Medieval Liturgical Offices afforded chant scholarship more melodies than it knew what to do with. Until now, chant scholarship involving 'Big Data' usually meant comparing individual feasts to the whole corpus or looking at general trends with respect to 'word painting' or stereotyped cadences. New research presented here, using n-gram analysis, networks, and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) looks to the nature of the gestural components of the melodies themselves. By isolating the notes preceding, and proceeding from, the naturally occurring semitones in the medieval church modes, we find significant recurrence of particular phrases, or riffs, which we propose could have been used to help 'build modes' from the inside out. Special care needed to be brought to the question of assumed B-flats that were not given explicitly in the manuscripts represented in Hughes' work. Understanding modes not as 'scales' but as a collection of associated smaller musical gestures, has resulted in a set of recurring riffs that appear as the identifiers of their larger contexts and confirming the influence of an earlier, oral / aural culture on these late medieval chants where musical literacy was expected.

Creating Word Paintings Jointly Considering Semantics, Attention, and Aesthetics

In this article, we present a content-aware method for generating a word painting. Word painting is a composite artwork made from the assemblage of words extracted from a given text, which carries similar semantics and visual features to a given source image. However, word painting, usually created by skilled artists, involves tedious manual processes, especially when generating streamlines and laying out text. Hence, we provide an easy method to create word paintings for users. How to design textural layout that simultaneously conveys the input image and enables easy access to the semantic theme is the key challenge to generating a visually pleasing word painting. To address this issue, given an image and its content-related text, we first decompose the input image into several regions and approximate each region with a smooth vector field. At the same time, by analyzing the input text, we extract some weighted keywords as the graphic elements. Then, to measure the likelihood of positions in the input image that attract the observers’ attention, we generate a saliency map with our trained visual attention model. Finally, jointly considering visual attention and aesthetic rules, we propose an energy-based optimization framework to arrange extracted keywords into the decomposed regions and synthesize a word painting. Experimental results and user studies show that this method is able to generate a fashionable and appealing word painting.

A Painting and A Slave Ship: Ruskin’s Visual Narrative On Turner

Thanks to his technique of ‘word painting’ and employing words to replicate what viewing a painting feels like, John Ruskin is actively engaged in associations between word and image. Ruskin admired Joseph Mallord Turner’s works as the painter also used his own poetry as subsidiary to his paintings. The fact that both artists are inspired by sister arts, poetry and painting has been long debated. Yet as Turner tried to syncretize his painting with poetry and Ruskin tried to render visual proses, they still remained aware of both the union and the gap between words and images. What Turner did with his visual narratives is communicating on a level that required spectators’ commitment and engagement. For that reason, Ruskin’s defense and advocacy of William Turner in Modern Painters through Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On (1840), or The Slave Ship, suggests a special example in relating both artists to each other as much visually as poetically and verbally. Further to that how Turner’s highly abstract composition that initially met with a great deal of negative reaction, came to function as a medium for reflection of greater depth on the horrors of slavery with a historical particularity could be discovered through revisiting Ruskin’s sublime, ekphrastic elaborations.

일제강점기 초기 창작가곡에서 한국적 예술가곡으로: 박태준 가곡에서 나타난 시와 음악의 상관관계

A study on the analysis of Park Tae-joon s art song is the first step in studying the process of transforming from early composing song to Korean style art songs in the early modern era of Korea. IIt focused on changing musical factors of his pieces from his initial period of time until the time when he established matured technique. I analyzed how the music expressed the lyrics when it sings a poem and how Korean elements were used in Park Tae-joon s music works.
 Generally Park Tae-joon composed simple music with regular phrase such as children s songs and hymns. Sometimes he tried to express the meaning of poetry matching texts with music by using musical elements like word painting, figurations of piano accompaniment and using irregular time. In addition, although he composed art songs that are western musical forms, he tried to use Korean musical idioms, which commonly used in Korean traditional songs called “Min-yo” such as a pentatonic scale, triple meter and Saeya harmony. This study finds that Park Tae-joon tried to find his identities of Korean art songs in the early modern era of Korea.

John Ruskin’s word paintings in the context of his principle of clear vision as well as the biblical and rhetorical tradition

This paper focuses on the chosen ekphrases (i.e. literary descriptions of visual works of art) which can be found on the pages of the treatises on painting and architecture written by John Ruskin, one of the most influential Victorian critics. However, these detailed and suggestive passages did not only serve the complementary purpose of illustrating the train of thought of the art connoisseur who was sharing his impressions from the continental tour with the readers. The style of word paintings also owes much to Ruskin’s intended lesson in astute observation, regarded as a necessary precondition to understanding the world, and his self-appointed function as a moralist who foresaw the danger of the spiritual decline looming over England. For this reason, first the critic’s notions of truth and nature will be discussed to elucidate the importance of clear perception in Ruskin’s writings. Then the ekphrases will be analyzed, paying special attention to their language which reveals the roles assumed by the critic. Simultaneously, references to the sources of Ruskin’s style, the Bible and ancient rhetoric, will have to be made.

Access to Children's Literature

Reading is important because if you can read, you can learn anything about everything and everything about anything. (dePaola, 2010) These words from well-known children's author Tomie dePaola are important. Having access to books, and knowing how to read those books, opens up a world of possibilities for children. Unfortunately, not all children around the world have access to books, and access to books varies greatly according to the neighborhoods in which children live. There is a disparity in access to print for those children who live in poverty (Neuman & Moland, 2019), with high-poverty neighborhoods primarily composed of minority groups having the least access to books (Bischoff & Reardon, 2014), which limits their opportunities in school and beyond. Likewise, across our world, access to books matters. Children's books also provide important moral messages in educating young readers: to be kind to others, to value friendship, and to help others, to name a few. In The Inside Track for this issue, Andrea Mei-Ying Wu, a scholar at the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, discusses why access to books matters in Taiwan and across the globe. She considers the implications that an emphasis on children's access to books has on their lives and on the formation of global citizenship. Wu introduces the Editorial Task Force for Children's Books and discusses its mission and the implications of its launch in the 1960s, and she explains that examining the history of this campaign in Taiwan can help teachers consider why access to books matters for students in today's world. We hope readers will find something new in this issue's five feature articles. First, Pletcher, Hudson, John, and Scott describe how to balance the hybrid role of the literacy coach and reading interventionist. Hoch, McCarty, Gurvitz, and Sitkoski examine guided inquiry in the digital age and explain how it requires instructional moves that differ from traditional methods. Rawlins and Invernizzi reconceptualize sight words and note the importance of building early reading vocabulary, and Coakley-Fields describes how a fourth-grade teacher cultivated an inclusive classroom while weaving fiction discussions into classroom instruction. Last, McVicker studies the preferences of readers, whether they prefer to be plugged or unplugged. There are also five teaching tips in this issue. Kibler and Chapman provide tips on using culturally relevant texts to improve reading outcomes. Mikita, Rodgers, Berenbon, and Winkler show the importance of targeted prompts when used with scaffolding word solving during guided reading. Beach and Bolden note how word painting supports vocabulary development. Nash, Panther, and Elson provide a description of student-created book basket labels as a culturally sustaining literacy practice in the classroom, and Thomas shows the importance of building literacy environments to motivate African American boys to read by providing texts in which they can see reflections of themselves in print. This issue's Voices From the Classroom essay was written by Rebecca Benjamin, a literacy specialist in the Schenectady City School District, New York. She discusses simple steps toward enhancing engagement in the classroom using poetry. In the two departments in this issue, Literacy Across Disciplines and Digital Literacy, Fisher and Frey offer a description of literacy stations and how they can be used in content area learning, and Gallagher, Di Cesare, and Rowsell provide an intriguing description of their work with newcomer families, the families’ digital lives, and digital literacy. Returning to the words of dePaola, “Reading is important, because if you can read, you can learn anything about everything and everything about anything.” Access to books is the first step in combating illiteracy worldwide, but we must also remember the disparity in communities that live in poverty and that access to books is a greater challenge for children in poverty than for their middle class peers.

A Call for Hypothesis-Driven, Multi-Level Analysis in Research on Emotional Word Painting in Music: Commentary on Sun & Cuthbert (2018)

This commentary discusses Sun and Cuthbert's (2018) exploratory analysis of emotional word painting in a corpus of English-language popular and folk songs. The authors are complimented for their application of computational tools to an impressively large sample of a somewhat understudied musical genre, and for their detailed level of analysis mapping musical features to the semantic content of individual words. This work, however, suffers from a lack of a priori predictions which causes multiple comparison issues leading to a dramatic reduction in statistical power. The selection of musical features and analytical strategies also seems arbitrary at times due to the absence of motivating hypotheses. It is argued that the ethological literature on affective vocal communication in animals might offer an avenue for future hypothesis-driven research on this topic.

Libby Larsen: Composing an American Life by Denise Von Glahn

Reviewed by: Libby Larsen: Composing an American Life by Denise Von Glahn Nomi Epstein (bio) Libby Larsen: Composing an American Life. By Denise Von Glahn. University of Illinois Press, 2017. 355 pp. Denise Von Glahn captures the life of the American composer Libby Larsen in her new biography, Libby Larsen: Composing an American Life. Larsen, one of today’s most prolific composers, works with a polystylistic compositional language: boogie-woogie, jazz, word painting, chant, and tonal and atonal harmonic practices are all part of the aesthetic she has developed over the last four decades. Since earning her PhD in composition from the University of Minnesota in 1978, Larsen has become a staple of Minnesotan culture through her multitudinous successes as a composer, as well as for her work as a promoter of new music. Living composers all over the United States are indebted to Larsen for her founding of the Minnesota Composers Forum in 1973 along with Stephen Paulus. The organization soon had chapters in multiple states and later became the American Composers Forum, an organization granting funding, opportunities, and other support for composers, commissioners, and those involved in new music. She was awarded Outstanding Woman of the Year in 1981 in Minnesota and subsequently appointed to the State Arts Board, in addition to holding the Minnesota Orchestra composer-in-residence position from 1983 to 1986. A Grammy Award–winning composer, she also received a lifetime achievement award from the American Academy of Arts and the George Peabody Medal for her work in new music. She holds the Papamarkou Chair at the Library of Congress and has received multiple honorary doctorates (https://libbylarsen.com/as_about). Numerous articles, dissertations, interviews, and book chapters have been written about Larsen, but Von Glahn has written the first full biography of the composer, and it will take a most welcome spot on the bookshelf of any music enthusiast. Von Glahn carefully outlines what is entailed in writing a biography, the role of the biographer, the possible viewpoints that a writer may adopt, the relationship of the biographer to the subject, and the pitfalls into which a writer may tumble. She aims to portray a set of causes and effects: because Larsen experienced x or finds y fascinating, she writes this piece, or uses this tool, or works with this collaborator. With this perspective, identity becomes Von Glahn’s central thematic focus. The author states her objective to present Libby Larsen as a person whose identity as a composer is only one part. [End Page 217] Having spent seven years researching her subject and having previously written about Larsen in other contexts, Von Glahn has carefully acquainted her-self with seemingly all available materials about the composer. Over the past four decades, Larsen has kept scrupulous archives of correspondence, sketches, notes, reviews, articles, writings, and lectures and willingly handed these materials over to her biographer. With these materials and new interviews with the composer and her collaborators, family, students, and assistants, Von Glahn weaves detailed justifications for decisions Larsen has made, works that she has written, or the ways Larsen may have reacted to or viewed an event or experience. Von Glahn diligently illustrates the multiple layers of the composer’s identity, demonstrating how each area has inspired and influenced the composer’s work, and it becomes a kind of task for the author to reiterate the identities and their truthfulness, accuracy, and importance to understanding the composer. Von Glahn organizes her thorough account of Larsen’s life and work into eight chapters in an innovative approach to the biographic form. She avoids the traditional chronological structure; instead, her eight chapters reflect the eight areas of inspiration that Larsen cites as most influential: historical events, family, religion, nature, the academy, gender, technology, and collaborators/critics. She steers us through each particular influence or chapter topic, always directing our focus, prompting us with what to keep in mind. The picture Von Glahn sketches of Larsen does so at the risk of consistent reiteration or reminding readers of the composer’s stated influences. One wonders if the choice of constructing the book in these eight chapters— the influences Larsen herself articulates— has placed the author into...

Weather in Texas: The Essential Handbook by George W. Bomar

Reviewed by: Weather in Texas: The Essential Handbook by George W. Bomar John W. Nielsen-Gammon Weather in Texas: The Essential Handbook. By George W. Bomar. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. ix + 290 pp. Illustrations, figures, tables, suggested readings, index. $24.95 paper. No matter where you go, you can find people talking about the bad weather in their states: cold in Montana, humidity in Alabama, hurricanes in Florida, tornadoes in Kansas, rain in Washington, blizzards in Minnesota, drought in Oklahoma, ice in West Virginia, floods in Pennsylvania . . . the list goes on and on. Or, rather than touring the country, you can just visit Texas and experience all of it, often in the same year! So even though George Bomar's new book, Weather in Texas, is about Texas weather, it's really about weather throughout the Great Plains and the rest of the United States, with examples from Texas. If the title and author sound familiar, it's because Bomar has been writing about weather in Texas for 35 years. His first book on the subject, Texas Weather, was published in 1983, and a second edition appeared in 1995. The current book draws extensively on material from the previous two, and like the first two it features an extensive compendium of historic weather data from every corner of the state. This means the book will appeal to those of us who are "weather weenies," who don't mind getting wet just to watch a thunderstorm blow through. The book features extensive descriptions of extreme weather phenomena, why they happen, and what makes them dangerous. Many weather events from Texas's recent and not-so-recent history are recounted. In the first two books, the last chapter was devoted to what to do about the weather: what precautions to take and how to stay safe when extreme weather does occur. The current book, Weather in Texas, is subtitled The Essential Handbook, and it lives up to its name with an expanded set of weather-specific advice that is integrated throughout the book. This is especially useful for Texas newbies. If you hear of a tornado watch, you can go to the tornado chapter and read about what causes tornadoes, the difference between a tornado watch and a tornado warning, what to do before and during a tornado, and why you wouldn't want to have been in Goliad, Texas, on May 18, 1902. Bomar's writing style is a bit florid. The reading might be heavy going for a middle-schooler, but adults [End Page 43] will appreciate how otherwise dry scientific information is transformed by Bomar into colorful word paintings. This makes it easy to read the book as a narrative, not just as reference material. Compared to his previous books, this one is much easier on the eye, with an appealing, readable font and colorful figures. My only serious criticism of the book regards its occasional scientific inaccuracies. For example, a quart of water contains far more than 1,000 molecules. Different parts of the book sometimes disagree on the same weather records. Hurricanes typically form at least several hundred miles from the equator, not within a few hundred miles of the equator. Along a dry line, the moist air undercuts the dry air, not the other way around. There are dozens of these scattered through the book. Also, the book was written before Hurricane Harvey, so just a few tables include statistics from that historic event. But you've got to draw the line somewhere. In Texas, extreme weather is just going to keep happening, and I'm glad George Bomar decided to say "enough is enough" and give us something to read. John W. Nielsen-Gammon Texas State Climatologist Department of Atmospheric Sciences Texas A&M University Copyright © 2019 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Word Painting: Using a Musical Technique to Enhance Vocabulary

Word Painting: Using a Musical Technique to Enhance Vocabulary

“Il pleure dans mon coeur”: Verlaine, Debussy, Kodály

The poetry of Paul Verlaine inspired several songs by Debussy. Il pleure dans mon coeur is no. 2 in the cycle Ariettes oubliées. The same poem is used as a motto for a short piano piece by Zoltán Kodály: no. 3 in the Seven Pieces for Piano, op. 11 (Esik a városban). The paper describes the madrigalesque word painting of Kodály’s composition on the one hand, and analyzes the modes of its melodic material on the other. In a broader context, the influence of French art (the music of Debussy in particular) on the artistic development of the young Kodály is discussed, as well as the two composers’ mutual estimation of each other.

Squalid and Obscure: Timbral Word Painting at the Arpa Doppia

Name: Kit (Hannah Rose) Spencer Main Subject: Baroque Harp Research Supervisor: Kate Clark Title of Research: Squalid and Obscure: Timbral Word Painting at the Arpa Doppia Research Question: Can timbral refinement, through synthesized notation and subsequent technical exercises, enhance contrast and word painting in arpa doppia continuo realisations of Seconda Prattica songs? Summary of Results: While functionally versatile, the arpa doppia, an Italian harp of imposing size with multiple layers of resonating strings, revealed its nature as fondamento, in the subtle art of continuo. Direct contact with the open strings gave singers, accompanying themselves on the harp, unparalleled control over the instrument’s timbral potential. This is reflected in the role of the instrument within musica secreta, private concerts at the courts of Ferrara and Modena stylistically favouring word painting and chromaticism, in ensembles such as the concerto delle donna and Baroni sisters. The expressive freedom of their art influenced poets and composers and contributed to the development of the seconda prattica at the turn of the sixteenth century. Indeed, voice and harp were held up as the ideal way to perform epic poetry, a reflection of the mesmerising contrast and colour their combined forces could deliver. How do we find this unique skill-set today from a broken line of tradition, contending with limited, conflicting primary resources? There is very little surviving repertoire specific to the instrument, and other sources such as paintings are static representations with considerable variation in position and placement of the instrument, body and hands, making it hard to replicate. In the years dedicated to exploring the arpa doppia, we harpists uncover these insights through shared motions and motivations of our forebears— finding a way to play like them by trying to vividly colour the text as they did. This is a way artistic research can bring to life the spectrum of lost practice and technique. My research has resulted in the creation of timbral notation for the arpa doppia, easily added to music notation and publishing software. This notation is designed to help recreate as much as possible all the timbral refinement found by the hands of masterful singer-harpists. It documents, builds upon and preserves the invaluable research of historical practitioners, using visual, contact-based diagrams to provide clarity in understanding this evocative and highly specialised art form. With this foundation of timbre and text, it aims to reconstitute the virtuosity, influence and innovation of the original arpa doppia players, through our shared practice today. Biography: While playing as the Australian Youth Orchestra's Principal Harpist, and as a fellow of the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, Kit Spencer's Honours degree culminated in studying Berio's infamous Sequenza II with its foremost interpreter, Alice Giles. Her passion for colour, gesture and bass lead her to arpa doppia, beginning with Andrew Lawrence King's St. Petersburg production of Landi's La Morte d'Orfeo and Monteverdi's L'Orfeo in Bauska Castle, Latvia.

Of Ruskinian Topography: Visible and Legible Salience in Modern Painters

As contemporary critics have shown, John Ruskin’s lifelong interest in geology not only provided him with a unique understanding of the mountain as a painting subject but also allowed him to develop an idiosyncratic theory of perception where movement and salience prevail – a theory he then applied to his often memorable prose. At first sight, salience is one feature of landscape that one can easily visually apprehend but much less easily account for in prose writing. However, recent research in linguistics may offer a new model for investigations and the means to identify recurrent patterns serving to highlight the transaction from the visual to the verbal and better qualify the writer’s “word painting”. More specifically, Frederic Landragin’s investigations on the relation between linguistic and visual salience may allow us to explore Ruskin’s prose further and see how the visual salience he noted in painting carries over in his own writing. Applying the salience model to Ruskin’s prose might therefore prove a new way to uncover some of the more elusive and distinctive features of his writing.

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival: 21–23 November 2014

hcmf// 2014 kicked off with a typically tough and knotty concert from Petr Kotik's chamber orchestra Ostravská banda, who performed a collection of UK premieres for small ensemble by Christian Wolff, three Czech composers and another American. The concert was billed as a tribute to Wolff, who was in attendance and who celebrates his eightieth birthday this year, and this acknowledgement of his status as one of the few remaining high modernists allowed the festival to begin with a celebration of the music with which it has been most closely associated. First up was Wolff's 37 Haiku, a setting of a poem (or 37 poems) by John Ashbery, sung by Thomas Buckner with an accompanying ensemble of oboe, horn, viola and cello. Like the poems, Wolff's settings are self-contained but accumulative, and, as the composer says in the programme notes, the ‘may form’ a whole. Variety is achieved through shifts within the accompanying instrumentation (some settings having none), line and fragmentation, instrumental technique, suggestions of common-practice harmony, flashes of word painting and spoken accompaniment from the instrumentalists (one haiku is spoken by the violinist, another is spoken in fragments across the ensemble). Coherence across these fragments is created simply through the presence of Wolff's mature and distinctive post-Webern sound world.

Congruence between Poetry and Music in Schumann's Dichterliebe

Abstract Poetry and music have in common various ways of structuring sound. In both, one can speak of rhythm, meter, loudness (e.g., accent), and pitch. Beyond sound in the narrow sense, one can also speak of syntax in that both language and Western tonal music create expectations that are satisfied or not in a variety of ways. These material aspects of poetry and music can be the basis for exploring how poetry and music fit together in vocal music in general and in individual works. The study of poetry in these terms came to prominence in the work of Roman Jakobson and others beginning in 1960 and has more recently been taken up by Marjorie Perloff and colleagues. The study of music with words has in general not considered the materiality that they share, especially not in the analysis of individual works. Writers on music have generally placed emphasis on expression of the semantic content of texts instead, privileging texts that can be read in relation to Romantic lyric theory. This has led to the search for word painting of one kind or another that has shaped the understanding of whole periods in the history of music and that is very much with us still, though this semantic domain cannot ultimately be separated from the material aspect of language. This article analyzes Songs 1, 2, 4, and 6 of Schumann's Dichterliebe in terms of this materiality with a view to showing how closely congruent poetry and music can be in their own terms in individual works without dwelling first on what they might be thought to express. This is to speak not at first about meaning but rather about the means by which meaning is created. Analysis of this kind in no way precludes hermeneutics. It is but one starting point and one that bears directly on the act of listening and perhaps performance.

PAINTING WITH IMPASTO: METAPHORS, MIRRORS, AND REFLECTIVE REGRESSION IN MONTAIGNE'S “OF THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN”

Analyzing Montaigne's triptych painting, “Of the Education of Children,” reveals a series of ever‐morphing, Dorian Gray–like canvases that depict metaphor mutations through which Montaigne defined education by distinguishing between schooling a child into a learned man and educating him into an able, active, and gentle person. Montaigne used metaphor and metaphor clusters to image key points in his educational philosophy, advanced his argument by intertwining, transmuting, and inverting metaphors, and thereby drew and vividly painted his philosophy of how to educate a person from cradle to coffin. Because the etymology and pronunciation of “essay” (from the French essai) support Montaigne's imaging and exploiting of this genre's creative potential, Virginia Worley begins by considering the term's etymology before positioning her analysis of Montaigne's work within metaphor research. She then examines the metaphors Montaigne used to paint the triptych word painting that embodies his philosophy of education: the meaning and value of educating in and for the art of living well.

Staged Bodies: Passing, Performance, and Masquerade in Charles W. Chesnutt’s <i>The House Behind the Cedars</i>

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., claims that “one of the ironies” of the New Negro Movement “is that words, not the tactics of visual representation, were the tools blacks used to assert their self-image” (xliv). While we can point to exceptions that complicate this observation—James Van Der Zee’s photography, Archibald Motley’s paintings, or W. E. B. Du Bois’s photographic collection Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U. S. A. (1900)— Gates identifies an important gap in the history of African American selfimaging. What happens, however, when we open up Gates’s terms to examine how authors using words might simultaneously employ “tactics of visual representation”? These written and visual representational modes are not easily or neatly separated. In fact, early African American literature regularly combined them. The first African American novelists creatively integrated these methods of representation in their texts, strategically dismantling racist visual iconography by developing an ocular language that invited consumers of their fiction not just to read their words but also to see the images those words conjured. This practice became even more prevalent during the New Negro Movement, particularly in passing novels that sought to embody mixed-race characters for socio-political purposes. This essay thus revises Gates’s claim that “until the 1920s there was virtually no black counterpoint to the hegemony of racist visual images that dominated the popular arts and more subtly infiltrated the fine arts” (xliv). Authors of the written word were developing a specific language, a visual discourse that sought to topple the hegemony Gates describes. Visual discourse builds on the practice of “word painting” that dominated US realist writing by the turn of the twentieth century. Edith Wharton identifies word painting as highly descriptive language that “help[s] to make [a character] bodily visible” (485). While not the only tool available for “conferring visibility” to “the reader’s mind” (484), the artist’s brush, when applied to the written page, aided realists who sought to convey an “acute visibility which makes the [reader’s] heart throb and the marrow tingle at the flesh-and-blood aliveness” of literary characters (481). Word