A collection of eclectic essays on the conceptualization as well as representation of fine elements of nature and time plus their intricate interrelationship in streams of the visual arts and literature offers a precious insight into the subject. Penned by scholars both from India and western academia, experts who are established authorities in their domain as well as critics making a foray in the realm of scholarly research make for an interesting combination. There is also an essay by a practising artist skillfully meditating on both nature and time through meticulous self-portraits.
‘Word, Image, Text’ is a laudable attempt to restore the balance in traditional literary scholarship of often veering towards the verbal. To borrow from Tiepolo’s Hound, a poem by Derek Walcott, talking of ‘Apelles Painting the Portrait of Campaspe’, an 18th century artist Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s artwork, the editors have done their best to ‘watch from the painting’s side’ the realm of the unfolding text.
The contributors to the thoroughly researched document boast writers from a wide section of skills, professions and locations, including India, Australia, the US Norway and Spain. Thanks to their inextricable and intricate intertwining of representation and discourse with images, the book succinctly imbricates visual and verbal experience. It argues that there is nothing like pure visual and verbal media, words without pictures and vice versa. The scholarly editors have adopted a classically deconstructive methodology to deconstruct the binary opposition between text and image, or the discursive and the visual, highlighting that neither image nor text can be seen as a pure entity in isolation from one another.
The scope of the volume is vast: it encompasses not just the literature and art of European continent from the 15th through the 19th centuries; it includes a careful examination of the Indian sub-continent’s art and literature as well. The visual and verbal genres examined are indeed manifold: painting, sculpture, frontispiece, engraving, miniature, book illustration, cartoon and photograph juxtaposed with epyllion, comedy, epic, satire, children’s fiction, travelogue etc.
A clear pattern is palpable in the essays whereby we start from visual forms and theorize to attain understanding of those forms via mental constructs.
‘Word, Image, Text’ is a laudable attempt to restore the balance in traditional literary scholarship of often veering towards the verbal. To borrow from Tiepolo’s Hound, a poem by Derek Walcott, talking of ‘Apelles Painting the Portrait of Campaspe’, an 18th century artist Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s artwork, the editors have done their best to ‘watch from the painting’s side’ the realm of the unfolding text.
The contributors to the thoroughly researched document boast writers from a wide section of skills, professions and locations, including India, Australia, the US Norway and Spain. Thanks to their inextricable and intricate intertwining of representation and discourse with images, the book succinctly imbricates visual and verbal experience. It argues that there is nothing like pure visual and verbal media, words without pictures and vice versa. The scholarly editors have adopted a classically deconstructive methodology to deconstruct the binary opposition between text and image, or the discursive and the visual, highlighting that neither image nor text can be seen as a pure entity in isolation from one another.
The scope of the volume is vast: it encompasses not just the literature and art of European continent from the 15th through the 19th centuries; it includes a careful examination of the Indian sub-continent’s art and literature as well. The visual and verbal genres examined are indeed manifold: painting, sculpture, frontispiece, engraving, miniature, book illustration, cartoon and photograph juxtaposed with epyllion, comedy, epic, satire, children’s fiction, travelogue etc.
A clear pattern is palpable in the essays whereby we start from visual forms and theorize to attain understanding of those forms via mental constructs.
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