Gander, Catherine and Sarah, Garland
(2013)
Introduction: To fasten words again to visible things: The American imagetext.
European Journal of American Culture, 32 (2).
pp. 115-120.
ISSN 1466-0407
Abstract
Welcome to this special issue of the European Journal of American Culture,
dedicated to the subject of the ‘American imagetext’.
The essays that follow arise from a conference that we organized at
the University of East Anglia in 2011, where we sought to provide an open
and receptive arena for the investigation of American cultural products and
ideas occurring at the intersection of word and image. Both of us scholars in
American literature and visual culture, and both feeling keenly the need for a
stronger presence of word and image research in American Studies, we sought
to create a forum in which like-minded researchers might come together in an
event of creative and intellectual exchange. We were delighted – and a little
surprised – when our call for papers received over 90 enthusiastic responses.
We were also delighted to be able to host keynote addresses from three
of the most established and eminent theorists in that field: W. J. T. Mitchell
(University of Chicago), Miles Orvell (Temple University) and Mick Gidley
(Leeds University), and were very grateful to delegates travelling from eleven countries and four continents. The conference invited speakers to consider
the product and practice of the interrelations of image and word in the widest
sense, encouraging, as we wrote in the call for papers, ‘a theoretical approach
that considers, for example, any aspect of science, historiography, theology,
iconology, art history, multicultural and transnational study, film and media
studies, poetry scholarship, and cognitive psychology’. Scholars from the
international interdisciplinary community responded to this wide brief with
energy, creativity and warm collegiality, and the gathering saw three days of
presentations and conversation across the breadth of image and text studies,
taking in (but not restricted to) abstract art and the manifesto, the discursive
contexts for design and architecture, photographic mediation and photo
books, artists’ books and notebooks, illustrated novels and graphic literature,
posters and textual art, concrete poetry and ekphrasis...
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