Review: Image and Text: Recent Research in Intermediality

Author(s): Sabine Gross

Review by: Sabine Gross
Source: Monatshefte, Vol. 93, No. 3 (Fall, 2001), pp. 355-366
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
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Monatshefte

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 Image and Text:
Recent Research in Intermediality
SABINE GROSS
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Review Article

Beschreibungskunst-Kunstbeschreibung. Ekphrasis von der Antike bis zur

Gegenwart.
Herausgegeben von Gottfried Boehm und Helmut Pfotenhauer. Miinchen: Wilhelm
Fink, 1995. 642 Seiten. DM 82,-.

Bild und Text. Internationale Konferenz des Komitees fiir ethnologische

Bildforschung in der Sociiti internationale pour Ethnologie et Folklore (SIEF).
Herausgegeben von Leander Petzoldt, Ingo Schneider und Petra Streng. Frankfurt
am Main: Peter Lang, 1995. 255 Seiten. DM 56,-.

Literatur intermedial. Musik-Malerei-Photographie-Film.

Herausgegeben von Peter Zima. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,
1995. x + 309 Seiten. DM 89,-.

Icons-Texts-Iconotexts. Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality.

Edited by Peter Wagner. Berlin and New York: W de Gruyter, 1996. 406 pages.
DM 168,-.

Languages of Visuality: Crossings between Science, Art, Politics, and Literature.

Edited by Beate Allert. Detroit MI.: Wayne State University Press, 1996. xii + 270
pages. $19.95.

Mimesis, Bild und Schrift. Ahnlichkeit und Entstellung im Verhiiltnis der Kiinste.
Herausgegeben von Birgit Erdle und Sigrid Weigel. Kaln, Weimar und Wien: Bohlau,
1996. 243 Seiten. DM 39,80.

Text Into Image: Image Into Text.

Edited by Jeff Morrison and Florian Krobb. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997.
353 pages. $97.00.
Das visuelle Gediichtnis der Literatur.
Herausgegeben von Manfred Schmeling und Monika Schmitz-Emans unter Mitarbeit
von Winfried Eckel. Wiirzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 1999. 230 Seiten.
DM 58,-.

Monatshefte, Vol. 93, No. 3, 2001 355

0026-9271/2001/0003/355

C 2001 by The Board of Regents of The University of Wisconsin System

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 356 Sabine Gross

Bild im Text-Text und Bild.

Herausgegeben von Ulla Fix und Hans Wellmann. Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2000. xvii
+ 425 Seiten. DM 98,-.
II

"Sichtbares, Hiirbares." Die Beziehung zwischen Sprachkunst und bildender

Kunst am Beispiel Paul Celans.
Von Sabine Konnecker. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1995. 176 Seiten. DM 48,-.
Die Wahrheit nach der Malerei.
Von Michael Wetzel. Miinchen: Wilhelm Fink, 1997. 328 Seiten. DM 50,-.

Die Literatur, die Bilder und das Unsichtbare. Spielformen literarischer

Bildinterpretation vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert.
Von Monika Schmitz-Emans. Wiirzburg: Kiinigshausen & Neumann, 1999. 366 Sei-
ten. DM 78,-.

Ein Bild, sagt man, sagt mehr als tausend Worte, macht sie tiberfitissig, sagt
man, sagt es besser und anders. Aber wie? Das muti man, will man es zeigen,
dann doch wieder sagen. Und das heiltt dann auch: iibertragen. Dabei stellen
sich notwendig Metaphern ein, Ubertragungen, in denen sich der Ubertra-
gungsvorgang selbst potenziert, seine Schwierigkeiten mit dem andern, nicht-
sprachlichen Medium, ja immer wieder, im entscheidenden Moment, den sprach-
lichen Bankrott bildlich artikuliert. [... Dies, was ich sage, ist das, was ein
anderes sagt, und deshalb ist es das nicht, sondern das nur anders, tibertragen.
(Christiaan Hart Nibbrig, "Wenn Bilder den Mund und Texte die
Augen aufmachen: Zwischen Wort und Bild," Ubergiinge
[Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1995] 41-42.)

The field of image-text relations has a long and distinguished history.

Thus the frequency with which the topic appears in recent scholarly liter-
ature should be taken less as a dramatic upsurge in interest and more as an
indicator that a generally fertile area of inquiry has benefited from-and
proven hospitable to-contemporary theoretical and methodological in-
terests and the current emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches. Tradi-
tional scholarship has focused prominently on the relationship between the
verbal and the visual in terms of Walzel's "mutual illumination of the arts"
as "sister arts," their complementarity and rivalry-with Lessing's Laokoon
as the most conspicuous modern signpost. (The editor of the 1992 volume
Literatur und bildende Kunst. Ein Handbuch zur Theorie und Praxis eines
komparatistischen Grenzgebiets [Berlin: Erich Schmidt], Ulrich Weisstein,
offers a taxonomy of such interart relations; the volume includes an exten-
sive and useful bibliography arranged by subtopic.) Specifically, the verbal
rendering of visual works of art (generally termed "ekphrasis"), be it in
poetry-as "Bildgedicht"-or prose, proves an enduringly popular subject.

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Review Article: Recent Research in Intermediality 357

The majority of the edited volumes discussed here had their origin in
conferences, colloquia, or lecture series on the topic of text and image, and
the texts collected vary considerably in scope and degree of reworking. The
titles listed represent the gamut from largely unrevised conference pro-
ceedings to expanded in-depth articles. A prominent feature of virtually all
these volumes is the kaleidoscopic diversity of the contributions. Most of
the editors-with varying success-attempt to impose some order on the
essays by arranging them according to subtopic, media involved, direction
of transfer, primacy of image or text, or historical period.
Within the scope of this review, it is impossible to do justice to each
individual contribution, and the fact that many of them go unmentioned
should not be taken as a reflection on their quality. The naming of individual
contributors and texts within the length constraints of this summary report
is not free from arbitrariness; moreover, it reflects inevitably not only the
judgment, but also to some degree the interests of the reviewer. The em-
phasis is on sketching the aims and scope of the volumes under review, with
the aim of providing an orientation for readers interested in the field. For
this reason, particular attention has been devoted to the introductions or
general texts that outline the primary thrust and specific concerns of the
respective volumes, rather than to the array of case studies, most of which
offer valuable contributions to the study of specific artists, texts, or genres.
Two substantial volumes explicitly address the function of texts as
description or translation of pictures/objects of art, as their subtitles indi-
cate: Beschreibungskunst-Kunstbeschreibung. Ekphrasis von der Antike bis
zur Gegenwart (Boehm/Pfotenhauer) and Icons-Texts-Iconotexts. Essays
on Ekphrasis and Intermediality (Wagner). Two of the 26 contributions in
the Boehm/Pfotenhauer volume, those by Fritz Graf and Otto Schdnberger,
are devoted to the origins and history of ekphrasis, in keeping with the
focus on description that provides the central emphasis for the hefty vol-
ume. A knowledgeable introduction outlines the scope of Beschreibung,
from descriptions of objects of art to the vividness of literary description in
general, and finally to the epistemological dimension of description in other
disciplines. The latter rubric presents three texts that are somewhat tan-
gential to the core concerns of the collection: Ernst Wolfgang Orth offers
a philosophically inflected view of description as symbolism, Dietrich von
Engelhardt explores the functions of description in the medical sciences,
and Meinhard Schuster outlines problems of ethnographic description.
In general, the volume leans heavily towards art history, with a dis-
quisition on "second-register" images within images in Renaissance paint-
ings (Wolfgang Kemp) and essays on, among others, Vasari (Svetlana Al-
pers, Matthias Winner), Giovan Pietro Bellori (Oskar Bitschmann), Win-
ckelmann and Heinse (Helmut Pfotenhauer), Goethe (Christian Lenz),
Burckhardt (Stefan Kummer), and early twentieth-century modernism
(Wolfgang Brtickner, Ernst Osterkamp). But it also includes contributions
on the function of pictorial descriptions in Gottfried Keller (Gtinter Hess),
Dostojewski (Victor Stoichita), Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (Gerhard Neu-
mann), Baudelaire's spectator-oriented aesthetics (Hans K6rner), and

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 358 Sabine Gross

Proust's Recherche (Elisabeth Schmid). Karl Pestalozzi addresses the privi-

leged genre of pictorial description, the Bildgedicht or ekphrastic poem, via
examples from Romanticism through Concrete Poetry. In a more general
section, Erika Simon discusses the prototypical example of Achilles's shield
and the issue of its representability, and Gottfried Boehm, Murray Krieger,
Emil Angehrn, and Brigitte Hilmer address general aesthetic problems of
description and image-text translation. The volume is essential reading for
anyone interested in the topic of art description and literary description in
general. Contributions are of uniformly high quality, and even detail-ori-
ented and highly specific essays generally include reflections on fundamen-
tal relations between the two media as well as the history or epistemology
of description as a genre. The illustrations are of decent quality, and the
volume includes a bibliography that goes beyond the "introductory" texts
it promises. Not coincidentally, Gottfried Boehm, together with Karlheinz
Stierle, is also editor of the series in which this volume appears: the series
title "Bild und Text" affirms the privileged role the publisher, Fink, accords
this topic.
Icons- Texts-Iconotexts. Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality po-
sitions itself as a revisionist update to the study of ekphrasis. This volume
assembles fourteen contributions in English and French, predominantly on
English and French "iconotexts" made to fit into four categories: "Ek-
phrasis and Theories of Reading Visual Representations," "Iconotexts"
from the eighteenth and the nineteenth century, and two papers on "Cari-
cature." The volume opens with a wide-ranging introduction by the editor
Peter Wagner which, stimulating as it is, repeatedly overshoots its mark.
Wagner brands established art-historical approaches to image-text relations
as traditionalist and resistant to poststructuralist ideas, while lamenting that
the pioneers of art-historical revisionism, upon whom he lavishes praise,
"were, unfortunately, busy elsewhere" (8) at the time of the conference on
which the volume is based, and therefore are not represented. Wagner's
ambitious introduction, subtitled "The State(s) of the Art(s)", occasionally
engages in battles that no longer require fighting or gets caught up in its
own challenges, as for instance when he ends his brief history of the term
ekphrasis with a plea to restore the term to its original rhetorical richness
(14) while simultaneously warning against the danger of not treating the
term as a neologism (13). Wagner's adoption of a broad definition of ek-
phrasis, moreover, conflates the level of description of an artwork and that
of an analysis of such a description: "a new ekphrasis" (35) consequently
encompasses, somewhat confusingly, both study and its object. His call for
treating texts and images as sign systems rather than as "the product of the
genial artist (whose intention must be unveiled)" (37) seems itself some-
what dated, and his commingling of semiotic and rhetorical categories with
questions of materiality and medium does not always foster terminological
clarity and sophistication of definition. His definition of "iconotext" as "an
artifact in which the verbal and the visual signs mingle to produce rhetoric
that depends on the co-presence of words and images" (16) neglects the
crucial question of modes of signification, and another definition of the same

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Review Article: Recent Research in Intermediality 359

term as "the use of [...] an image in a text or vice versa" (15) seems to
imply that neither the direction of this movement nor the superordination
of one of the factors implicit in his definition matters. His definition of
"intermediality" as a "subdivision of intertextuality" (17)-why not a su-
perordinate category?-is close to that of Thomas Eicher and Ulf Beck-
mann (Intermedialitiit. Vom Bild tum Text. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1994), who
assert that it is "hilfreich, am Konzept der Intermedialitiit festzuhalten, um
die Besonderheit des Medienwechsels terminologisch schairfer fassen zu
k6nnen" (19). Wagner's use lacks these authors' detailed investigation of
the term "medium" and its potential meanings.
Wagner's occasional terminological fuzziness combined with his some-
what self-aggrandizing insistence that his volume breaks new ground in
moving the analysis of image-text relations out of the "dilemma" or "stale-
mate" (32) of simplistic correspondences, oppositions, and traditional her-
meneutics makes for less than entirely enjoyable reading, especially coupled
with his unabashedly partisan introduction of his own terms and his praise
of his contributors' achievements as "wholly persuasive" (20), "daring and
innovative" (20), "most impressive" (21), "valuable" (25), or "fascinating"
(25). One might question whether "for a book inquiring into verbal and
visual representation [... there could be no better starting point than the
libertine discourse on love" (19)-thus Wagner on Jean-Pierre Dubost's
"Iconolatrie de iconoclastie de l'6criture libertine." Wagner's personal voice
is a little too prominent in a number of ways (see note 53 on p. 19, where
he chastises American university presses for having failed to publish a trans-
lation of a German Habilitation), and while the individual contributions are
on the whole illuminating, not all seem to fit the editor's own definition of
"ekphrasis," "iconotext," or "intermediality": Fr6d6ric Og6e's comparison
of Sterne's verbal strategies and Fragonard's visual strategies for repre-
senting eroticism and suspending time, for instance, while touted by author
and editor as a triumph over the "correspondences-of-the-arts-approach"
(23, 137), offers little on the topic of the book. Finally, it is not clear why
the introduction redundantly includes verbatim quotes of extended pas-
sages from the (English) abstracts that precede the articles (for instance,
pages 19-20/43, 24/136, 26/213, 27/263). But while the editor's tendency
towards intellectual grandstanding may give rise to puzzlement or criticism,
in other respects this is a solidly edited and well-produced volume with
noteworthy essays that includes both black-and-white and color illustra-
tions, a bibliography, and an index-in other words, it is up to the high
standards one expects from the pricey de Gruyter publications.
Compared with Boehm/Pfotenhauer's rewarding volume and Wag-
ner's ambitious, if not always convincing approach to the field of image-
text relations, the following collection is situated in the margins of the field
as considered from the vantage point of literary studies and art theory. Bild
und Text. Internationale Konferenz des Komitees fiir ethnologische Bildfor-
schung in der Socidtd internationale pour Ethnologie et Folklore (Did you
know there was a "Committee for ethnological image research?" This re-
viewer did not.) offers about 30, mostly brief conference papers supple-

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 360 Sabine Gross

mented by illustrations with rather less-than-satisfactory reproductive qual-

ity. While few of these English- and German-language contributions to "vi-
sual anthropology" (7)-most of them using Eastern European examples-
are truly incisive or memorable, they offer an intriguing array of such di-
verse topics as "Verschiedene Ebenen der Bild-Text-Relation aufgezeigt am
Beispiel der Eule," "Die Scherenschnitte der osteuropaischen Juden,"
"Hair as Sign in Turkish Folklore and Cartoons," or "Gezeichnete Gassen-
zeitungen und Plakate im tschechoslowakischen Herbst 1989," and several
cast an illuminating sidelight on more narrowly defined literary or cultural
studies-a reminder that different disciplines may converge on similar top-
ics from quite different angles.
The title of Peter Zima's Literatur intermedial. Musik-Malerei-Pho-
tographie-Film expands the frame of inquiry as it returns us to the realm
of the "intermedial"-defined here, however, not as "between text and
image," but incorporating a number of artistic media. Zima re-institutes the
"mutual illumination of the arts" (Walzel) that Wagner wanted to challenge
with his volume. In his introduction, Zima diagnoses a "Zersplitterung des
asthetischen Bereichs [...], die ein beziehungsloses Nebeneinander von
Literatur, Musik, Malerei und Film zur Folge hat," (1) and calls for a com-
bination of "wissenschaftliche Genauigkeit" and "eine asthetische Ge-
samtschau" based on interdisciplinary collaboration (1). In a historical-phil-
osophical excursion (Kant, Hegel, Lukics, Croce, Adorno), he seeks to
liberate art from philosophical concepts, following Adorno in the search
for a language beyond verbal communication (11). Trying to forge connec-
tions between semiotics, literary analysis, and the sociology of art in a tra-
jectory that includes Russian Formalists, Prague Structuralists, and such
diverse theoreticians as Walzel, Bourdieu, and Greimas, Zima's aim is to
direct analysis both to that most abstract level at which different artistic
media become comparable and to the media-specific concretization of the
individual work of art (20, 22), while acknowledging that the contributions
in this volume are "too heterogeneous" (22) to carry out this program.
While the diversity of topics addressed makes for heterogeneity, the
strength of this volume lies in the depth and detail of the individual essays.
With lengths between 23 and 41 pages and sizeable individual bibliogra-
phies, each has intellectual heft and makes a substantial contribution to its
area. In this sense, Zima's volume is at the opposite end of the spectrum
from the entertaining smorgasbord of the ethnology proceedings. The in-
dividual texts return to such general categories as verbal vs. nonverbal
forms of art, and the role of time vs. space in different art forms, as they
tackle individual media and their interrelations and develop arguments
around specific examples. The introduction is followed by three sections
with a total of eight articles. The three contributions making up the first
section deal with "Wort und Ton": Ulrich Miller analyzes text-based com-
positions ("Vertonungen von Literatur") from the carmina burana to Wag-
nerian opera; Albert Gier addresses, among other things, musical language
as self-referential; musicality of language in literature, and the historical
trajectory that includes a conceptual shift from "music as language" to "lan-

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Review Article: Recent Research in Intermediality 361

guage as music" in the eighteenth century (74). Finally, Gerhard Scheit in

"Die Oper als Gesamtkunstwerk" highlights the medial heterogeneity of
opera.
A second section, "Wort und Bild," encompasses an article on inter-
relation and competition among literature, painting, and drawing by Hans
Hollander that takes up, once again, Lessing's Laokoon and also returns
to the topic of ekphrasis proper. Rolf Giinter Renner investigates the re-
lationship between aestheticized surroundings and aesthetic signs as it af-
fects the role of landscape/nature in both painting and texts, pointing out
structural parallels in visual and verbal strategies. Finally, Hubertus von
Amelunxen offers a historical and theoretical inquiry into the effect pho-
tography had (a) on visual experience and viewing habits and (b) on the
representation of the visual in literary texts. The third and final section,
"Wort, Bild und Ton," offers two essays on film. Franz-Josef Albersmeier
develops a taxonomy of possible relationships between texts and film based
on Spanish cinema, while Volker Roloff's analysis centers on French Sur-
realist and Nouvelle Vague films.
In contrast to Zima and Wagner, Schmeling and Schmitz-Emans in
their tri-lingual volume Das visuelle Gediichtnis der Literatur (German, En-
glish, and French) deliberately narrow the area of intermedial relationships
to literary representations of images (here one encounters the usual prob-
lem of translation, with the German "Bild" extending, variously, to "im-
age," "picture," or "painting," all of which are addressed in this volume),
while regarding them from a specific angle: that of memory and cultural
process. The editors consider literary texts as privileged sites of cultural
memory-not as mere repositories, but as engaged in a process of continual
reflection and transformation of memory and its archives (7-11). Specifi-
cally, they argue in their "Vorbemerkungen" that images and literary texts
serve as each other's memory and transformation, and they define culture
as a web of images and texts. The volume presents a dozen contributions
arranged under the headings of 1) Theoretical Reflections, 2) Historical
Positions, and 3) Case Studies. In her introductory text in section one, "All-
gemeine Uberlegungen zur Beziehung zwischen Texten und Bildern" (17-
34), Schmitz-Emans points out that modern texts, in particular, frequently
seek to ground themselves in images or pictures while and as they sublate
the images they incorporate (20-21). Schmitz-Emans's reflections on the
relationship between literature and image repeatedly incorporate spatial
metaphor when she describes it as a "Spannungsraum" (19) or space for
the imagination (20). Her insistence on the role of transformation, process,
and imagination in the literary-visual dynamic does not invite argument
and perhaps for that reason may strike the reader as less than illuminating:
after all, the common denominator of the variety of approaches and posi-
tions taken by editors and authors in these volumes is the insistence that
the text-image relationship cannot be presented as one of simple corre-
spondence or translation. Her essay calls on examples to outline three
modes of translation/transformation: Diderot's expansion of a painting into
a narrative by way of a dialogue between its subject and a spectator; Lich-

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 362 Sabine Gross

tenberg's translation of Hogarth via a commentary that functions as verbal

equivalent of the drawings and serves to direct the viewer's attention; and
finally, an instance of rewriting a painting (Breyten Breytenbach on Manet's
Olympia) that makes visible/legible what has been excised and rendered
mute by cultural dominance.
Individual analyses in this volume range from less than ten to almost
30 pages. Among them, Winfried Eckel's article focuses on the epistemo-
logical dimension in "Wissen und Sehen": Landscape/nature returns as a
subject here as well in another essay by Schmitz-Emans herself; and among
the case studies (including Edward Hopper, Nabokov, Sagan/Botero, Sem-
prtin), two deserve singling out because of their somewhat unusual focus
on literary representations or incorporations of architectural form: Ste-
phanie A. Moore on Proust's Recherche, and Bernard Dieterle on Hugo's
Notre-Dame de Paris.
Two other edited volumes are based on conferences: Text into Image:
Image into Text (Morrison/Krobb) presents a smorgasbord of 35 fairly short
papers, minimally edited in order "to preserve the oral style" (12), as the
editors note in a brief and not highly sophisticated introduction that pres-
ents the interrelation of image and text primarily in terms of "cross-fertil-
ization" and "interdependence." As is typical for conference presentations,
the contributions generally have limited scope and offer capsule explora-
tions rather than thoroughly developed or broadly based analyses. The
range of periods, genres (including a section with eight papers on German
film), national literatures (about 50 percent on German texts, artworks, and
authors), and topics "may at first seem bewildering" (12) as the editors
remark. Their attempt to view this juxtaposition as an undoing of "artificial"
disciplinary borders is not quite convincing: trans- or interdisciplinarity is
not a cumulative effect and thus not achieved this easily. It requires cross-
referencing and the establishing of interconnections. But the volume is a
Fundgrube for aficionados of image-text relations because of its variety of
materials. A final note: Given the small number of illustrations, one won-
ders why the whole volume was printed on heavy glossy (and expensive)
paper.
Of the 25 contributions in Bild im Text- Text und Bild (Fix/Wellmann),
a good number signal a shift from the artistic to the pragmatic. The domi-
nance of art-historical concerns is replaced by semiotics, stylistics, discourse
analysis, visual communication, media studies, and pedagogy. While stylistic
and narratological approaches are directed towards the role of images in
texts by-among others-Hofmannsthal, Broch, Ddblin, Musil, Thomas
Mann, Grass, Frisch, Christa Wolf, and Gert Hofmann, a number of the
contributions focus on non-literary texts and everyday communication:
newspapers, dictionaries, fliers-even money as text, in an original contri-
bution by Monika Cla(en. "Bildhaftigkeit" and "Anschaulichkeit" are re-
current issues, an emphasis brought home by the large number of illustra-
tions.
Where the Fix/Wellmann volume offers detailed analysis and concrete
examples on topics uniting image and text, the contributions in Mimesis,
Bild und Schrift, edited by Sigrid Weigel, are bound together less by any

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Review Article: Recent Research in Intermediality 363

common themes (the brief "Vorbemerkung" does little to establish a frame

for the individual contributions) or a focus on actual intermediality. What
they do share is a strong theoretical inflection shaped by poststructuralist
and psychoanalytical emphases as well as a sensitivity towards discourse,
power, and "mimetic techniques beyond mirroring and representation" (2)
in modern and postmodern art-techniques that complicate any presumed
access to an imagined reality. Of the dozen texts, most address, in some
fashion, the issue of Entstellung (distortion, misrepresentation, disfigure-
ment) that appears in the subtitle and expands upon a quote by Walter
Benjamin on the "world distorted in a state of resemblance." The contrib-
utors approach texts and/or images from various angles-as memory ar-
chive, language desire, against the background of media history or art as
institution. Bodies and their images figure prominently, and three of the
contributors explore issues in cinema or photography-among them Chri-
stine Brinckmann, with an outstanding contribution on the "anthropomor-
phic camera." With the exception of an essay on revealing and concealment
in Greek tragedy by Renate Schlesier (a translation of a text previously
published in English), all other contributions deal with twentieth-century
texts, art, or media.
Like Weigel's collection, Beate Allert's Languages of Visuality simi-
larly moves beyond image-text relations and intermediality proper. This is
perhaps the most wide-ranging edition represented in this overview: its
dozen articles deal with a variety of media (similar in this respect to the
Zima volume), and it is much more successful in achieving what in the
Krobb and Morrison volume remained mostly at the level of hopeful in-
vocation: an impressive degree of interdisciplinarity. There is less inter-
mediality than one might expect, but the highly diverse contributions are
united by the authors' combination-to varying degrees, to be sure-of
sociopolitical concerns with media-technological issues. The volume as a
whole addresses the interrelations of aesthetics, culture, technology, and
power, considering the visual as textual, and as a part of human cognition
(the latter holds true especially for Christopher Collins's essay). "Classical
Greek Origins of Western Aesthetic Theory" are addressed (by John T.
Kirby) alongside eighteenth-century investigations of synaesthesia via Cas-
tel's "ocular harpsichord" (Joachim Gessinger), and technological and de-
sign innovations shaping opera (Friedrich Kittler). Nineteenth- and twen-
tieth-century artists are presented: Novalis, Holderlin, Palazzeschi, de Chi-
rico, Klee, Henry James, Nabokov, Benjamin, and Peter Schneider. The
volume is made both more usable and useful by an index and a detailed
introduction in which Allert situates-and summarizes the significance of-
the individual contributions.

II

Edited volumes provide a good overview of current scholarship in a

multi-faceted or kaleidoscopic way, with individual contributions and vol-

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 364 Sabine Gross

umes varying in scope and comprehensiveness. In addition to the publica-

tions presented here, three recent monographs deserve mention. Sabine
K6nnecker's study of the interrelation of language and visual art in Paul
Celan's work does not offer general, theoretical, or programmatic state-
ments. It provides a detailed and precise account of an under-researched
area in Celan scholarship: the different ways visual art appears in, and has
had an impact on, Paul Celan's texts. KOnnecker approaches her topic
through Celan's texts and through biographical information. One of the
three major sections of the study is devoted to art-oriented visuality in
Celan's work, addressing the tendency towards visuality and plasticity both
as a stylistic feature and as it derives from-and refers to-specific works
by artists such as Chagall and Brancusi. The second section explores Celan's
collaboration with surrealist artist Edgar Jen6. Celan wrote a preface for a
collection of Jend's work, and the artist contributed two lithographs to Ce-
lan's Der Sand in den Urnen, one of them on "Todesfuge." To show "other
possibilities for an artistic transposition of the poem" (84), Kinnecker also
includes Anselm Kiefer's works inspired by the same poem in this chapter.
The third section deals with the various forms of artistic exchange repre-
sented in Celan's collaboration with his wife, graphic artist Gisble Celan-
Lestrange, with whom he conceived the volumes Atemkristall and Schwarz-
maut. Konnecker's monograph does not aspire to theoretical generality.
Neither does it seek to revolutionize Celan research. What it does-and
very well, at that-is to provide a knowledgeable and informative account
of a significant aspect of Celan's writing, a valuable contribution to Celan
scholarship, and additional insight for readers grappling with Celan's po-
ems.

The title of Michael Wetzel's Die Wahrheit nach der Malerei would
pose difficulties for a translator. As Wetzel himself remarks in his introduc-
tion, the preposition combines the sense of appropriation (as in "according
to"), of supercession (simultaneously putting an end to any claim towards
truth that painting might have held before), and of supplementarity. Not
coincidentally, the title also marks Wetzel's hommage to Derrida and his
work Die Wahrheit in der Malerei. Wetzel's main emphasis is on contem-
porary art-one chapter deals with the Kassel documenta X in 1997-,
including a large variety of genres, media, and hybrid forms of visual art.
But his examples range across centuries of European art and literature, and
his command of the material presented is matched by a theoretical sophis-
tication that combines lucidity and intellectual challenge. A short chapter
on "re-presentation and difference" (157-68) can double as an introduction
to Derridean thought, and Wetzel's wealth of examples serves-without
overwhelming-his central concern with the question of truth and repre-
sentation in modern art. He easily forges connections between the aesthetic
and political dimension of art and its presentation, and he combines a com-
mand of semiotics with a distinctive awareness of-and indeed insistence
on-the mediality of visual art. Wetzel is less concerned with the interre-
lations between image and text, although he does have an impressive chap-
ter on "Schriftbilder-Bilderschriften." As opposed to most other works

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Review Article: Recent Research in Intermediality 365

introduced here, he does not conflate "text" with "writing," but usefully
considers images as texts-and as texts, for that matter, which function as
traces, not as presence. Wetzel does not doubt that we read-not just
view-images. It is their very legibility that he calls into doubt, or rather,
his argument is that the works of art themselves question or challenge our
ability to read-extract referentiality or truth-from them.
Wetzel's study is an intelligent and illuminating piece of scholarship,
as is Schmitz-Emans's monograph Die Literatur, die Bilder und das Unsicht-
bare. Spielformen literarischer Bildinterpretation vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahr-
hundert. As her title signals, she combines a historical perspective with a
thematic focus-and does so admirably. Her focus on the interrelation be-
tween text and image is well-defined: she deals with texts about, based on,
or originating in, images. Beyond this concern with intermedial transposi-
tion, elaboration, and variation, she argues that both texts and pictures
share an affinity with what remains invisible in-or beyond-any image.
In part I, her study addresses systematic aspects of the relationship between
word and image-be they semiotic, medium-related, or aesthetic. For in-
stance, she presents a series of theses about the relationship of word and
image in the twentieth century, each of which is proposed in turn and is
worth considering: 1) the chasm between them has widened, 2) there has
been a commingling of both forms, 3) there was no separation to begin
with, 4) images always already draw on words and texts-and vice versa.
Schmitz-Emans leans towards the last thesis, and her study seeks to provide
evidence for not just the semiotic status of images in general, but their
linguistic constitution qua reference to texts inscribed in them and under-
lying them. After a concise and insightful history of ekphrasis, the first part
of her study sketches the development of image-text relations starting with
the eighteenth-century move towards clearer differentiation between the
two. From here she goes on to argue that texts increasingly accept the
challenge of images, which enrich texts by calling on them to elucidate what
remains invisible in the image: "Gerade in ihrer Sichtbarkeit stellen Bilder
eine Einladung an die Sprache dar, nach dem Unsichtbaren zu fragen und
dabei die Macht der Texte zu erproben. Die Bilder kommen ihnen dabei
in gewissem Sinne entgegen, indem sie den Appell zur Ujberschreitung des
Sichtbaren auf Unsichtbares hin selbst schon in sich tragen" (48).
The bulk of her monograph is devoted to a series of case studes that
do double duty by offering insights into the work of specific authors while
simultaneously making the case for, and marking, a historical trajectory of
development and change. They can only be sketched here, but they make
rewarding reading on both levels. Subchapters explore image-into-text
strategies by Diderot, Lichtenberg (both of these were incorporated, in
much abbreviated form, into Schmitz-Emans's contribution to her co-edited
volume, see above), the early Romantics, Jean Paul, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Ju-
stinus Kerner, Calvino, Robbe-Grillet (on Magritte), and Michel Butor. For
Diderot and Jean Paul, Schmitz-Emans argues that the stories they spin
from and about pictures simultaneously function as reflexive commentaries
on the text-image relationship itself (187). And she points out how Kerner's

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 366 Sabine Gross

late-nineteenth century "Kleksographien" (precursors of today's Rorschach

test, they are interspersed with other illustrations throughout the volume)
prefigure twentieth-century aesthetic practices in art. Calvino, in turn, ex-
emplifies a paradoxical twentieth-century artistic aporia: the task is to de-
cipher an illegible world, a project that is doomed yet necessary (249).
The brief overview of recent publications maps out a landscape that
offers plentiful opportunities for exploration and discovery-of different
media and their interrelations, and of semiotic, aesthetic, cultural-political,
and literary issues. While an overview of new publications confirms that
scholars continue to embrace-and add to-a well-established tradition of
ekphrastic criticism, recent publications also expand the field to include
other forms, aspects, and dimensions of intermedial relationships. A couple
of landmarks can be discerned. One is the way in which "image" and "text"
lend themselves to permutations that go beyond slogan character in sig-
naling a variety of possible relationships between the two poles: image and
text, text into image (or vice versa), text after image, Text im Bild/Bild im
Text. Another recurring element in about half of the publications presented
is the reference to one or the other version of Magritte's famous "Ceci n'est
pas une pipe." The enduring appeal of this image-text (in more than one
sense) is indicative of the enduring intellectual-and perceptual-chal-
lenge that resides in the complicated relationship between seeing and
naming, showing and telling, mode of signification and referent, word and
image.

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