Keynote Speakers & Guest Writers
Keynote Speakers
Intermediality and the Value of Beauty: Henry James’s Ground
This lecture approaches the political and aesthetic territory that is made available by intermediality. To understand the value of aesthetic beauty, it argues, it is necessary to gain access to the places that art maps out, that do not belong to any given mode of thought or expression, but that lie in the interstices between them – those interstitial spaces that are the domain of the intermedial.
The lecture explores this relation between intermediality and aesthetic beauty in relation to the work of Henry James, particularly his artist-writer stories – such as The Author of Beltraffio, The Figure in the Carpet, The Aspern Papers. James establishes in these works what I will be calling here a particular type of ‘ground’ that is associated at its heart with the intermedial. This is the ground that James brings to possibility; it is also the ground upon which our claims to the value of aesthetic beauty in our time might rest.
Peter Boxall is Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He has written a number of books on the novel, including Twenty-First-Century Fiction (2013), The Value of the Novel (2015), and The Prosthetic Imagination (2020, winner of the MLA James Russell Lowell prize). He has written books on Samuel Beckett and Don DeLillo, and his edited collections include 1001 Books (2006), volume 7 of The Oxford History of the Novel (with Bryan Cheyette, 2016), and the Cambridge Companion to British Fiction: 1980-2018 (2019). He has been editor of Textual Practice since 2009. His volume of collected essays, The Possibility of Literature, came out in 2024, and he is currently at work on a book entitled Fictions of the West.
Art history and literature : going beyond ekphrasis
An intermedial generic reconfiguration and a « modest proposal ».
One has to acknowledge that the presence of art in literary texts has kept steadily increasing. Not only have ekphrasis continued to be favourite tropes but the discourse of art history has gained ground providing technical and material elements, detailing the components and the composition of the works of art, showing the mixing and grinding of colours, describing artists’ studios and models, all these matters pertaining to the domain of art history struck me as more and more significant. The historical surroundings of art objects, the role of commissions and patrons, learned discussions between experts, constituted an artistic aura while critical discourse and debates took into account their production context. The role of museums and galleries, and the overall social and political issues at stake often anchor the descriptions in a historical reality thus providing « referential illusion »1.
Going « Beyond ekphrasis » then, I propose to reconsider to what extent we can reconfigure the use of art in text as a transdisciplinary instance of intermediality, leading us to reconsider the interrelationship between literature and art history. Ekphrasis might then be deemed as an intermedial mediator. Considering the relentless use of art history in literature could lead to a disciplinary reconfiguration based on redefining borders and breaking down interdisciplinary barriers.
I have already referred to a type of ekphrasis I called « critical ekphrasis »2 which was in fact the first step towards what I propose now. But I needed more time and research as well as a theoretical « encounter » to move forward. I may then venture a little further and take into account another use of art in text and ekphrasis not only submitted to a narrative use but also verging on another discipline.
I will try to demonstrate that art history and literature may cooperate even fuse together to constitute a new critical generic possibility, inaugurating an intermedial generic reconfiguration on the macro level. It might introduce a new genre of critical art writing beyond traditional « writing on art » by essay writers and novelists, when whole chunks of a novel consistently borrow art history techniques and expertise. This is when the novelist turns art historian and alters the genre of his/her novel, elaborating a hybrid genre many recent novels already resort to, as I will try to show.
Relying on them and with the help of theoretical works advocating the removal of barriers between human « sciences » and literature in the wake of Hayden White’s take in Narrative discourse and historical Representation3, Ivan Jablonka’s in his Third Continent, Stephen Cheeke’s Writing for Art and research in genre studies, among others, I will try and see if a reconfiguration of art in text may open up onto a new assessment of the relationship not only between word and image but between literature’s narrative techniques shared with art history. For it works both ways : while art history resorts to narrative techniques, fiction draws on narrative art history writing. Giorgio Vasari maybe paved the way when in his Lives of the Best Painters, Sculptors and Architects he referred to their « lives » he had to fictionalize and to their art he had to comment upon, thus maybe being the first art history literary writer.
1 Michael Riffaterre, « L’illusion référentielle », Littérature et réalité, Paris, Seuil, 1982. Published in English in Columbia Review, 57.2, Winter 1978, 90-105.
2 Liliane Louvel, « Types of ekphrasis , An Attempt at Classification », Renate Brosch ed., Poetics Today, vol. 39, Number 2, June 2018, 245-264.
3 Hayden White, The Content of the Form, Narrative Discourse and Representation, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London,1987, Ivan Jablonka, Le Troisième continent ou la littérature du réel, Paris, Seuil, 2024, Stephen Cheeke, Writing for Art, The Aesthetics of Ekphrases, Manchester University Press, 2008.
Liliane Louvel is Professor emerita at the University of Poitiers (FORELLIS). She has written numerous articles and published five books on contemporary British literature and word/image relationships: L'œil du texte ( PUM 1998), The Picture of Dorian Gray, Le double miroir de l'art (Ellipses, 2000), Texte/image, images à lire et textes à voir ( PUR 2002), Le tiers pictural, PUR 2010. Translations are available as: Poetics of the Iconotext, tr. L. Petit, ed. K. Jacobs, Ashgate 2011 and The Pictorial Third an Essay into Intermedial Criticism, tr. A. Tseti, Routledge 2018. She has also edited several collections of essays including, EJES, Word/image, EJES, …Like Painting, La licorne and PURennes II, les Actes du colloque de Cerisy : Texte/image nouveaux problèmes with H. Scepi. Actes du colloque de Cerisy Littérature et photographie with J-P Montier, P Ortel et D Méhaut, PUR. Also of note: Intermedial Arts, with L Eilitta and S Kim, Cambridge Scholars Press 2012. Musing in the Museum, with L Petit end K Brown, Word /Image, Taylor and Francis, (2015). Her monograph on Stanley Spencer, un visionnaire du quotidien, is to be published by Presses de la Sorbonnein 2025.
She was the former president of SAES (French Association of English academics) and ESSE, The European Society for the Study of English. She is the President of IAWIS/AIERTI (the International Association for Word and Image Studies) and a member of the executive of ISIS. Liliane Louvel was made a chevalier.e dans l’ordre de la Légion d’honneur in 2011.
Born in Malaysia, he lives in Singapore, where he sleeps with the fishes.