Jan Baetens

Jan van Van Looy

Close Reading New Media is the first publication to apply the method of close analysis to new media.Since the early nineteen-nineties, electronic art and literature have continually gained importance in artistic and academic circles. Significant critical and theoretical attention has been paid to how new media allow the text to break traditional power relations and boundaries. The passive reader becomes an active participant choosing his own path and assembling not just his own interpretation of the text (level of the signified), but also his own text (level of the signifier). Texts no longer have a beginning or an ending, being a web of interlinked nodes. The decentered nature of electronic text empowers and invites the reader to take part in the literary process. Poststructuralist theorists predicted a total liberation of textual restrictions imposed by the medium of print. However, while these are culturally significant claims, little attention has been paid to their realization. The goal of this volume is twofold. Our aim is to shed light on how ideas and theories have been translated into concrete works, and we want to comment on the process of close reading and how it can be applied to electronic literature. While all contributions deal with particular works, their aim is always to provide insight into how electronic fiction and new media can be read.This book proposes close readings of work by Mark Amerika, Darren Aronofsky, M.D. Coverley, Raymond Federman, Shelley Jackson, Rick Pryll, Geoff Ryman and Stephanie Strickland.

Analyzing Electronic Literature

Close Reading New Media

Dit boek is het vervolg op Modernisme(n) in de Europese letterkunde: 1910-1940, dat in 2002 met hetzelfde redactieteam bij dezelfde uitgever verscheen. In tegenstelling tot dit eerste luik, dat een historisch overzicht gaf van de manier waarop de internationale stroming van het modernisme vorm kreeg in de verschillende Europese literaire tradities, legt dit nieuwe boek de klemtoon op de interactie tussen de literatuur en de andere artistieke en maatschappelijke gebieden: enerzijds disciplines als film, theater, graphic design, muziek en schilderkunst; anderzijds velden als filosofie, politiek, cultuurgeschiedenis en sociologie. Bovendien wordt ook de chronologische begrenzing van de modernistische periode kritisch bevraagd, zowel tegenover het voorafgaande realisme en symbolisme als tegenover het latere postmodernisme. Tenslotte gaat ook veel aandacht uit naar de specifieke rol en inbreng van Vlaanderen en Nederland in het Europese en mondiale modernisme.

een ander meervoud

Modernisme(n) in de Europese letterkunde

A collaboration between Belgian artist François Schuiten and French writer Benoît Peeters, The Obscure Cities is one of the few comics series to achieve massive popularity while remaining highly experimental in form and content. Set in a parallel world, full of architecturally distinctive city-states, The Obscure Cities also represents one of the most impressive pieces of world-building in any form of literature. Rebuilding Story Worlds offers the first full-length study of this seminal series, exploring both the artistic traditions from which it emerges and the innovative ways it plays with genre, gender, and urban space. Comics scholar Jan Baetens examines how Schuiten’s work as an architectural designer informs the series’ concerns with the preservation of historic buildings. He also includes an original interview with Peeters, which reveals how poststructuralist critical theory influenced their construction of a rhizomatic fictional world, one which has made space for fan contributions through the Alta Plana website. Synthesizing cutting-edge approaches from both literary and visual studies, Rebuilding Story Worlds will give readers a new appreciation for both the aesthetic ingenuity of The Obscure Cities and its nuanced conception of politics.

The Obscure Cities by Schuiten and Peeters

Rebuilding Story Worlds

Hugo Frey

Fabrice Leroy

This book explores the important role of the graphic novel in reflecting American society and in the shaping of the American imagination. It guides readers through the theoretical text-image scholarship to explain the meaning of the complex borderlines between graphic novels, comics, newspaper strips, caricature, literature, and art.

The Cambridge Companion to the American Graphic Novel

Sarah Dobai

Joanna Lowry

Green, David

"Theatres of the Real presents work by eight photographers Sarah Dobai, Annabel Elgar, Tom Hunter, Sarah Pickering, Nigel Shafran, Clare Strand, Mitra Tabrizian and Danny Treacy, who can be seen as extending and redefining a tradition of British documentary photography by engaging with a range of social issues or by simply recording aspects of our contemporary world. However, the work that they make does not conform to the conventional methods and style of documentary photography." "Many of these artists' works involve situations that have been staged for the camera: sets have been constructed, actors have been dressed in costumes, and narrative scenarios invented. Other works, however, conform to the conventions of 'straight' photography: they record pre-existing scenes without any kind of direct intervention by the photographer. However, what unites all of these photographs is a sense of theatricality. Ranging from melodramatic reconstructions to the small tales of everyday domestic life, these images - in their different ways - portray our contemporary world as a kind of stage set in which we as actors play out our individual and collective stories." "Straddling the boundaries between fact and fiction, these images create a hallucinatory vision of contemporary Britain. This is a Britain that is framed by the gleaming architectures of global corporate business, on one side, and by the neglected streets and hinterlands of its towns and cities, on the other. These are also places that are peopled by social types that we recognize: alienated adolescents, working men, secretaries, city bankers, the down and out. But these photographers have recognized the imaginary power of such scenarios and characters and reconstructed them for us with an irony that is acute and subtle. Through a blurring of the real and the imaginary they offer us a vision of contemporary Britain that is both profound and comical; a black comedy in which bankers throw themselves to their solitary deaths off city buildings, where the police prepare for social insurgency in artificial urban environments, and where mundane kitchen sink scenarios compete with the strange plasticized interiors of offices and shopping malls." "Published to coincide with the exhibition held at the Foto Musemn Provincie Antwerpen this book contains reproductions of many of the photographs in the exhibition and other works by the artists, together with essays by Joanna Lowry, David Green (both of the University of Brighton) and Jan Baetens (Universityof Leuven, Belgium)." --Book Jacket.

Theatres of the real

Catriona MacLeod

Véronique Plesch

This book aims at offering a broad survey of the encounter between word and image studies and anthropology and to demonstrate the mutual benefits of this dialogue for both disciplines in the three fields of the image (Marin), the social history of writing (Petrucci), and memory (Yates). The themes discussed by the contributors to this volume, all specialists in their field, highlight each in their specific field one or more aspects of the agency of both text and image. Bridging the gap between the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin research traditions, this bilingual volume focuses on three major questions: What do we do with texts and images? How do texts and images become active cultural agents? And what do texts and images help us do? Contributions cover a wide range of topics and disciplines (from visual poetry to garden theory and from ekphrasis to new media art), and represent therefore the best possible overview of what cutting-edge analysis in word and image studies stands for today.

Efficacité, Efficacy

Stephen E. Tabachnick

The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel provides the complete history of the graphic novel from its origins in the nineteenth century to its rise and startling success in the twentieth and twenty-first century. It includes original discussion on the current state of the graphic novel and analyzes how American, European, Middle Eastern, and Japanese renditions have shaped the field. Thirty-five leading scholars and historians unpack both forgotten trajectories as well as the famous key episodes, and explain how comics transitioned from being marketed as children's entertainment. Essays address the masters of the form, including Art Spiegelman, Alan Moore, and Marjane Satrapi, and reflect on their publishing history as well as their social and political effects. This ambitious history offers an extensive, detailed and expansive scholarly account of the graphic novel, and will be a key resource for scholars and students.

The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel

S. Houppermans

Het begrip "modernisme" is zonder twijfel een van de meest verraderlijke uit de hele literatuurwetenschap: intuitief weten we allemaal wat de term ongeveer inhoudt, maar tegelijkertijd is het heel moeilijk uit te leggen wat "modernisme" nu precies betekent; anderzijds voelen we ook aan dat de bestaande definities zo divers zijn en elkaar bij momenten zo tegenspreken, dat de verleiding groot is om af te zien van welke definitie dan ook en de betekenis van het concept zo open mogelijk te laten voor de lectuur van concrete, "modernistische" teksten, waarvan de structuur altijd complexer en eigenzinniger is dan elk etiket.De opzet van de bundel is niet de vraag naar de ultieme definitie van het begrip "modernisme" eens en voor altijd te beantwoorden. Wel is er geprobeerd, op basis van de hypothese dat het "modernisme" staat voor een bepaald moment en een bepaalde poetica in de Westerse literatuur tussen 1910 en 1940, de interne verscheidenheid en de verrassende rijkdom van het concept in kaart te brengen.Een vijftiental auteurs uit Nederland en Vlaanderen geven in deze bundel een overzicht van wat het "modernisme" voor zowel de grote als de kleine literaturen in Europa betekende: dus niet alleen Frankrijk, Engeland, Duitsland, Rusland, Spanje en Italie, maar ook Vlaanderen, Nederland, Griekenland, Polen en Scandinavie. Het geheel wordt ingeleid door een historische situering en afgesloten met diepgravende essays over vier auteurs die het Europese modernisme hebben gemaakt: Proust, Joyce, Doblin en Pessoa. Een index van namen en titels zorgt ervoor dat deze monografische encyclopedie van het Europese modernisme een handig naslaginstrument wordt.

Modernisme(n) in de Europese letterkunde 1910-1940

Discarded by archivists and disregarded by scholars despite its cultural impact on post–World War II Europe, the film photonovel represents a unique crossroads. This hybrid medium presented popular films in a magazine format that joined film stills or set pictures with captions and dialogue balloons to re-create a cinematic story, producing a tremendously popular blend of cinema and text that supported more than two dozen weekly or monthly publications. Illuminating a long-overlooked ‘lowbrow’ medium with a significant social impact, The Film Photonovel studies the history of the format as a hybrid of film novelizations, drawn novels, and nonfilm photonovels. While the field of adaptation studies has tended to focus on literary adaptations, this book explores how the juxtaposition of words and pictures functioned in this format and how page layout and photo cropping could affect reading. Finally, the book follows the film photonovel's brief history in Latin America and the United States. Adding an important dimension to the interactions between filmmakers and their audiences, this work fills a gap in the study of transnational movie culture.

A Cultural History of Forgotten Adaptations

The Film Photonovel

"This book provides both students and scholars with a critical and historical introduction to the graphic novel. Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey explore this exciting form of visual and literary communication, showing readers how to situate and analyze graphic novels since their rise to prominence half a century ago. Several key questions are addressed: What is the graphic novel? How do we read graphic novels as narrative forms? Why is page design and publishing format so significant? What theories are developing to explain the genre? How is this form blurring the categories of high and popular literature? Why are graphic novelists nostalgic for the old comics? The authors address these and many other questions raised by the genre. Through their analysis of the works of many well-known graphic novelists - including Bechdel, Clowes, Spiegelman and Ware - Baetens and Frey offer significant insights for future teaching and research on the graphic novel"--

An Introduction

The Graphic Novel

Ce livre donne pour la toute première fois un aperçu de la littérature française à contraintes en prose. Contrairement à un préjugé tenace, écrire à contraintes n’est pas seulement une pratique poétique, mais touche également au genre apparemment le plus « libre » qui soit, le roman. Combinant analyse théorique et microlecture stylistique, le présent ouvrage passe en revue l’essentiel des auteurs et des livres qui explorent ce domaine, parfois très connu (Jacques Roubaud, Claude Ollier, Robert Pinget, par exemple), parfois plus confidentiel (Jean Lahougue, Bernard Colin, Jean-Benoit Puech, notamment). Dans le sillage du travail réalisé par Jan Baetens dans le cadre de Formules, la revue des littératures à contraintes, cette étude s’intéresse aussi de très près à toute une série de figures rhétoriques dont le roman à contraintes fait un usage systématique.

Romans à contraintes

Ana Gonzalez

Rassemblant les actes du colloque international sur le roman-photo qui s'est déroulé à la Fondation NOESIS en août 1993, le présent volume aborde pour la toute première fois les diverses facettes du genre longtemps négligé qu'est la narration photographique. Les grands spécialistes européens et américains du roman-photo présentent ici une synthèse des connaissances actuelles tout en formulant de multiples pistes de recherche pour les années à venir. Leurs interventions s'organisent autour de cinq axes-clé l'histoire du genre, le problème de son lectorat, ses rapports avec des pratiques analogues tels le reportage ou le livre illustré, les questions relatives à la spécificité controversée du roman-photo et, enfin, l'analyse détaillée de ses plus belles réussites, anciennes ou contemporaines. Une bibliographie très fouillée couronne l'ensemble. Faisant alterner les voix des théoriciens et des critiques, des lecteurs et des praticiens, les actes de ce colloque constituent à la fois une somme et un laboratoire, un ouvrage de référence et un instrument de recherche.

actes du colloque de Calaceite (Fondation NOESIS), 21-28 août 1993

Le Roman-photo

Ana González Salvador

Rassemblant les actes du colloque international sur le roman-photo qui s'est déroulé à la Fondation NOESIS en août 1993, le présent volume aborde pour la toute première fois les diverses facettes du genre longtemps négligé qu'est lanarration photographique. Les grands spécialistes européens et américains du roman-photo présentent ici une synthèse des connaissances actuelles tout en formulant de multiples pistes de recherche pour les années à venir. Leurs interventions s'organisent autour de cinq axes-clé: l'histoire du genre, le problème de son lectorat, ses rapports avec des pratiques analogues tels le reportage ou le livre illustré, les questions relatives à la spécificité controversée du roman-photo et, enfin, l'analyse détaillée de ses plus belles réussites, anciennes ou contemporaines. Une bibliographie très fouillée couronne l'ensemble. Faisant alterner les voix des théoriciens et des critiques, des lecteurs et des praticiens, les actes de ce colloque constituent à la fois une somme et un laboratoire, un ouvrage de référence et un instrument de recherche.

La lecture critique de la bande dessinée valorise souvent la dimension purement visuelle des planches au détriment du texte. C’est sous-estimer un pan décisif de cet art, et singulièrement tout le sel des albums d’Hergé. Son oeuvre, qui transforme la bande dessinée en genre littéraire, invente en effet un nouvel équilibre entre l’iconique et le verbal. Dans le cas d’Hergé, la «ligne claire» est autant question d’écriture que de dessin. Voilà ce que démontre brillamment l’essai de Jan Baetens, initialement publié aux éditions Labor et entièrement revu pour la présente édition. Dans le «style» d’Hergé, le souci du texte complète le goût des histoires et l’invention linguistique renforce les trouvailles de mise en page ; ce sont dans les jeux sur les mots, les lettres, les phylactères et la narration que l’on découvre un Hergé véritablement «écrivain».

Hergé écrivain

Allan Sekula

Hilde van Gelder

As scratches of reality, Sekula's photographs and films leave their traces in our minds. They encourage, yes, even force reflection, and through that, slow changes can probably become a reality, certainly at the level of the individual.

Around Allan Sekula's Photography

Critical Realism in Contemporary Art

Jean-Paul Gabilliet

Qu'on lui choisisse comme date et lieu de naissance la Suisse des années 1830, avec les récits et images de Töpffer, ou l'Amérique de la fin du XIXe siècle, avec les suppléments dominicaux en couleur de la presse quotidienne, la bande dessinée semble avoir toujours été propice à la création de récits et de séries fantastiques. On voit du reste assez pourquoi : ces nouveaux récits étaient en rupture avec les formes de la littérature réaliste et permettaient de créer, en quantités vertigineuses, des visions de lieux imaginaires. Des mondes oniriques de " Little Nemo " aux myriades d'animaux anthropomorphes s'exprimant par bulles, des " réalismes " décalés qu'illustrent les plus grandes séries du canon franco-belge aux ruptures esthétiques qu'inaugurent les jeunes Turcs de l'Association ou de Fréon, la bande dessinée depuis ses débuts semble susceptible de décliner à l'infini ses possibilités d'expressivité fantastique. Ce numéro d'Otrante veut avant tout rendre compte de cette diversité du fantastique dessiné. Le choix des sujets en témoigne : Batman et Donald Duck, mais aussi Jacobs et Schuiten, Andréas et Comès, Trondheim et les frères Deprez. Analysant récits, planches, cases et phylactères, les auteurs ici rassemblés proposent un éventail de regards sur des bandes dessinées " fantastiques " et sur la démarche créative des auteurs de bande dessinée lorsqu'ils " font " du fantastique, délibérément... ou à leur corps défendant !

Fantastique et bande dessinée

Mireille Ribière

This volume focuses on the relationship between time, narrative and the fixed image. As such, it highlights renewed interest in the temporality of the fixed image, probably one of the most important trends in the formal and semiotic analysis of visual media in the past decade. The various essays discuss paintings, the illustrated covers of books, comics or graphic novels, photo-stories, postcards, television and video art, as well as aesthetic practices that defy categorization such as Chris Marker's masterpiece La Jetée. The range of works and practices examined is reflected in the different theoretical approaches and methods used, with an emphasis on semiology and narratology, and, to a lesser extent, aesthetics and psychoanalysis. The interest of this book, however, does not stem exclusively from the range and scope of the artefacts examined, or the methodological issues that are addressed; its fundamental importance rests in the contributors' readiness to question the differentiation between fixed and moving images which all too often provides a convenient, if not altogether convincing, starting point for image analysis. . The originality and value of the contribution that Time, Narrative and the Fixed Image/Temps, Narration et image fixe makes to the body of theoretical writing on visual media lies in this challenging and comprehensive approach.

Temps, Narration Et Image Fixe

Sjef Houppermans

Otto Boele

Pete Liebregts

This book manifests at least four recent shifts and tendencies within Modernist studies in general that point at the expansion of this increasingly interdisciplinary field. First, Modernist studies has seen a temporal expansion, to the extent that scholars in the field have come to turn to both the pre- and posterior history of Modernism. Second, the field has witnessed a spatial expansion, in that increasingly so researchers have also come to scrutinize the Modernisms of regions at the fringes of Europe, and beyond. Thirdly, a vertical expansion too has marked Modernist studies in recent decades, not only by further expanding the canon of women writers and exploring the continuum between high- and lowbrow, but also by looking at the artistic and mediatized hierarchies and cross-fertilizations operative in the period. A fourth conceptual expansion of the field shows that whereas concepts such as “middlebrow”, “arrière-garde”, and to some extent even “avant-garde”, were once exotic notions of at best marginal importance in European Modernist studies, they now form part and parcel of the field, complicating and expanding it conceptually.

Jan Baetens

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