Literature between Media

Last week I attended an interesting symposium  - Literature between Media – at Hedmark University College in Hamar, Norway. I presented the paper “Digital Ekphrasis, or, A Visual Sense is Born in the Fingertips” and also participated in a summary discussion with Professors Lars Elleström and Tim Murray. The programme can be found here.

The Sense of Touch

Aesthetic Theory and Digital Interfaces

I presented my new project Aesthetic Theory and Digital Interfaces at the Media Places Conference that took place in HUMlab earlier this week. The project is a broadening of my ekhprasis-project.

Digital Enargeia/Ekphrasis

”To emphasize the rhetorical nature of ekphrasis is also to draw attention to the vestigial orality of the phenomenon, the way in which the discussions of both ekphrasis and enargeia assume live interactions between speaker and audience, with language passing like an electrical charge between them.” (Ruth Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persusation in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2009), p. 129)

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Reverse Ekphrasis or the Look of Reading? (Garrett Stewart)

IASS Conference in Lund

This Friday I will present a paper at a conference in Lund:

‘A Visual Sense is Born in the Fingertips’. Towards a Definition of Ekphrasis for the Digital Age

This paper aims at rethinking the concept of ekphrasis with a special focus on how digital technology shapes, transforms and reconfigures the dynamic relationship between word and image. According to Ruth Webb in her Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice (2009), the ancient and rhetorical practice of ekphrasis and the concept used in modern literary criticism belong to fundamentally different systems. The ancient definition emphasizes enargeia and the impact on the listener. The visual referent is less important. The modern definition of the term, developed for the analysis of written texts, engages with the visual mainly as referent. In this paper the significance of the ancient definition of ekphrasis will be re-examined through digital art and electronic literature. It will be argued that the ekphrasis of the digital age, with its emphasis on enargeia and on the viewer/reader/user-bodily interaction with the work of art convey an aesthetic of tactility. Also to be discussed is how deeply rooted the notion of ekphrasis is in print based texutality.

New article in new journal

My article “‘Bildseendet föds i fingertopparna’. Om en ekfras för den digitala tidsåldern” has been published in a new journal about visual culture:

 

 

Ekfrase: Nordisk tidskrift för visuell kultur

 

Looking at/through Beuys in Berlin

Electronic Literature

A Hopeful Monster – A Trading Zone 

Post-Derridean Era and Parergon

 

Last week at the conference Writing in a Post-Derridean Era at Växjö University with the paper Digital Ekphrasis. Word/image-relations in the age of the computer, a connection between the transitory aspect of digital text that Derrida describes in Paper Machine and the Quintilian notion of ekphrasis – staging a performance aiming at enargeia – was made. In the Quintilian notion ekphrasis performs that which it represents and the digital ekphrasis in computerized novels and electronic literature oscillates between inside – outside – inside. This could be further elaborated on with Derrida’s critique of the Kantian notion that a painting or sculpture can be subdivided into ergon and parerga - the workand its supplement (in the form of framing, drapery or other borders). Derrida writes in The Truth in Painting: “A parergon comes against, beside, and in addition to the ergon, the done (fait), the fact, the work, but it does not fall to one side, it touches and cooperates within the operation, from a certain outside” (1978:54) Digital Ekphrasis, its historical origins and philosophical development throughout the centuries, could serve as a means of exploring the innovation of digital technologies and word/image-relations in particular.

[m]e-framing

Wo[m]a[e]n. Space and visual layers.

Digital Ekphrasis: The Intersection of Literature, Visual Art, and Technology

This is a blog on my postdoc-project about ekphrasis, literature and digital humanities. The project aims at rethinking the dynamic relationship between word and image with a special focus on how digital technology shapes, transforms and reconfigures literary representation. The significance of the rhetorical concept and genre of ekphrasis (the verbal representation of a visual representation) will be re-examined through contemporary print novels, where the digital has left its mark (i.e. through strategies that require digital processing, and through thematic and formal explorations of the digital), as well as through electronic literature (computer-programmed literature meant to be read on a screen).

Ekphrasis is an old rhetorical concept, but what is innovative is the way that the computerized novel and electronic literature emulate the spatial and visual qualities that literary ekphrastic texts have historically struggled to achieve. The computerized novels, such as for example Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) by Jonathan Safran Foer, combine pictures and words in an innovative way and they are, according to N. Katherine Hayles, imitating electronic textuality at the same time as they are intensifying specific traditions of print literature. On the other hand, in electronic literature and digital poetry the visual object can be described by voice and other sounds, as well as a text while they could be set in motion. Is it useful or even relevant to use the concept of ekphrasis, and what is the consequence when words approach the condition of visuality and movement and vice versa? Could it be that the traditional ekphrasis collapses when words, images, voice, sounds and movement are brought together, but that this dialogical displacement of positions instead gives birth to the digital ekphrasis.

Consequently, I will propose a theoretical frame-work for analysing ekphrasis in computerized novels and electronic literature. The traditional distinctions between visual and verbal media, such as G. E. Lessing describes them in Laokoön (1766), will here be described – with W.J.T. Mitchell and Mikhail Bakhtin’s as a configuration which stages a dialectical tension, or a semantic shift, that is geared towards the digital ekphrasis.