The Pictorial Third ― An Essay into Intermedial Criticism

The Pictorial Third: An Essay into Intermedial Criticism examines the extent to which poetry intertwines with painting and the visual at large, and studies the singular relationship established between language and image, observesing the modalities and workings of what is termed ‘intermedial transposition‘. By following a critical method of the close analysis of texts, the book examines to what extent the "pictorial" tool may be of help to analyze literary texts and thus enlarge and enrich literary criticism.

Examining the technical notions typical of the medium and its history, including perspective, framing, colour, anamorphosis, trompe-l’œil, Veronica veil, still life, portrait, figure, illusion, apparatus, genres and styles, this volume presents a pragmatics of image-in-text and of the visual-in-text as an operative tool. This "pictorial" reading necessarily includes synesthesia and the senses; it also functions as a reading event , or what happens to one when one unawares encounters a picture (be it present in the book or the object of an ekprhasis). Thus the body is eventually given back a role to play. The sensitive approach has its own resonances and the eye or the gaze sometimes sees double in such intermedially oriented texts. This volume proposes to identify the pictorial third as the phenomenon which can be apprehended in terms of effect or affect not only as a concept.

Dr. Liliane Louvel is emerita professor at the University of Poitiers, France, and the President of the European Society for the Study of English. She received the title of Chevalier dans l’ordre de la Legion d’Honneur, the highest National Order or award in France, in 2011. She has published numerous articles and books on the interrelationship between word and image, including : L'?il du texte (Toulouse PUM 1998), The Picture of Dorian Gray, Le double miroir de l'art (Ellipses, 2000), Texte/image, images a lire et textes a voir (Rennes PUR 2002), Le tiers pictural PUR 2010. Poetics of the Iconotext, Translation by Laurence Petit, edited by Karen Jacobs, Ashgate July 2011.