Introduction: Literature and the Arts: A French Perspective on Visual Poetics, Language, and Artistic Representation

The fact that a spatial work of art doesn't speak can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, there is the idea of its absolute mutism, the idea that it is completely foreign or heterogeneous to words. . . . But on the other . . . we can always receive them, read them, or interpret them as potential discourse. That is to say, these silent words are in fact already talkative, full of virtual discourses. (Jacques Derrida, in Peter Brunette and David Wills, eds. Deconstruction and the Visual Arts)

Much has been written on the state of visual poetics and word-image relations and a certain malaise has developed as to where art history and literary criticism are now heading. To be sure, "French theory," as it was called in the 1980s, has had a profound influence on the studies of iconotexts, ekphrasis and intertextuality. Structuralists and poststructuralist theoreticians--from Barthes and Kristeva, to Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida--have all, within their respective fields, expanded Horace's original concept of ut pictura poesis, which in art criticism, history, and literature meant the "correspondences of the arts" or "the sister arts" or even "the mutual illumination of the arts." Roland Barthes, for instance, taught the world that everything from painting to objects, to practices, and to people, can be studied as "texts." Barthes and Kristeva in his wake, made us see what semiology can do for the understanding of cultures and social practices and their expression in images. Foucault, who treated "any continuity with suspicion," opened our eyes to the social production of meaning and its inscription through power while Lacanian psycho-analysis demonstrated how the human subject is formed in the play of gender difference. Finally, Jacques Derrida's statement that "il n'y a pas de hors texte" confirmed that there was no vantage point of reference outside of language from which the truth claims of language itself can be verified. Yet, attractive and challenging as their viewpoints were, these theorists often faced the cruel and unavoidable tensions between the ideals of clarity and coherence that govern philosophy and the inevitable shortcomings that accompany its application. As with many others, Foucault applied was often Foucault betrayed. These tensions between artists, writers, and philosophers constructed multi-level narratives of fragmented dissonances and equivocal authorship and yet the resulting apparent disjunctive dialogue opened fascinating avenues of research and interests.

Contributing to the rapid dissemination of French theories in the United States were excellent translations and collections of essays such as Norman Bryson's notable 1988 Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France which assembled works by Kristeva, Baudrillard, Marin, Foucault, and Barthes. In his collection Bryson contrasted the Anglo-American approach in art history, and notably the continuing "perceptualist procedure" as represented by E. H. Gombrich in Art and Illusion, with the French insistence on the sign, its social production and formation, and the problems of power and control. Focusing on works from antiquity and Byzantium and on paintings by Masaccio, Raphael, Titian, Vermeer, and Manet among others, Bryson explained why classical European painting developed its particular technical features of composition, color, perspective, brushwork, and the manipulation of narrative.

Presently, the question raised in visual poetics is whether the "French connection" has played itself out and whether interdisciplinary studies in art and literature have reached a cul-de-sac. I believe the essays in this section will prove the contrary. There are now new and creative ways in visual poetics; people are moving from literature to art history, from narratology to visual rhetoric, crossing interdisciplinary borders and moving beyond the well-established word-image opposition. The articles are reflections on ideology, gendering, and vision, that urge us to consider images as rhetoric or encoded signs that must and can be "read" with the tools provided by narratology and poststructural theories.

Certainly, the basis of the relation between...