Literature and Art
Elizabeth Benjamin, Sophie Corser
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Text, Artefact and the Creative Process: ‘The Sad, Bewildered Quills’ of Guido Cavalcanti
David Bowe
doi:10.59860/wph.a27682a

This article will engage with issues of material culture and medieval technologies of writing in conversation with representations of the creative process and poetic subjectivity through a close reading of the sonnet ‘Noi siàn le triste penne isbigottite’ [We are the sad, bewildered quills] by the Florentine poet (and friend of Dante) Guido Cavalcanti (c.1255-1300), in light of common representations of scribes at work in visual culture. By reading Cavalcanti’s representation of the art of writing and the artefact of the text this article will explore the ‘written-ness’ of the Italian tradition, in contrast with the oral performance culture of troubadour lyric, and the implications of this material, textual tradition for the representation of a fragmented self. I will posit that Cavalcanti’s poetic praxis depends on the legible, material object of the text. Across Cavalcanti’s lyric output we witness a disassembling of the self into myriad, often physiological, parts, which are given individual voices through sustained prosopopoeia, generating a model of subjectivity located in physiology and textuality. In this sonnet, this practice is extended even to the implements of textual production. I will highlight the manner in which the multiple voices of Cavalcanti’s texts engage in an internalised dialogue, and their fundamental role in the representation of his poetic self. My reading will investigate this sonnet’s representation of tools of writing as lyric voices in themselves, contextualising this imagery within Cavalcanti’s poetics of self-fragmentation and placing it in conversation with the material culture of the circulation of poetry in late-medieval Italy. This article will act as a meeting place for issues of visual and material culture, textuality, and poetics in so far as they all contribute to the foregrounding of creative processes — the creation of poetic texts, content and selves — in this Cavalcantian text.

Medusan Figures: Reading Percy Bysshe Shelley and Walter Benjamin
Mathelinda Nabugodi
doi:10.59860/wph.a385c71

The myth of the Medusa has always occupied a prominent position in thinking about art and its relation to life. Medusa’s petrifying power performs a shift from motion and mobility to rigidity and permanence: this passage resembles the process by which living images and thoughts are turned into artistic representations. Since Medusa cannot be seen directly, but only through her reflection – be it on Athena’s shield or in words – she poses questions of representation that are central to artistic production. This paper seeks to explore some of the theoretical implications of the Medusan myth in the context of the writings of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Walter Benjamin. My primary focus is Shelley’s poem ‘On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci, In the Florentine Gallery’ (1819) and the Medusan themes running through Benjamin’s thought on literary criticism and on history. This paper grows out of a thesis that traces motifs and images that appear in the work of both writers in order to both reveal affinities between them and to investigate the significance of their writings in the formation of twentieth century literary theory. I am particularly interested in how the Medusan scenario turns into an image of critical self-reflection; one where the boundary between literary and critical representation is negotiated by means of a Medusan interchange of gazing and imagining, petrification and insightful reading. The paper is not in pursuit of proving or disproving a hypothesis nor in creating a coherent narrative. Instead it looks at a number of different facets of its title – Medusan Figures – to investigate the role that this myth can play in thinking and writing about literature from a theoretical point of view.

The Painter in the Novel, the Novelist in the Painting: ‘To the Lighthouse’ and Vanessa Bell’s ‘Portraits of Virginia Woolf’
Annalisa Federici
doi:10.59860/wph.a47ca18

This essay explores the implicit connection between Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), a novel featuring the figure of a painter as one of its protagonists, and the Post- Impressionist portraits of Woolf painted by her sister Vanessa Bell between 1911 and 1912. I will posit that this relation is based on a series of analogous aesthetic principles that manifest the closeness of the professional and private relationship between the sister artists. Moreover, I propose a reading of To the Lighthouse that, although taking into account the influence of Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist dichotomy between ‘vision and design’, especially highlights Woolf’s metanarrative commentary on her own aesthetic principles, as variously discussed in both her private and her public texts. I also suggest that the artworks in question are distinct and at the same time closely connected manifestations of Woolfian ideals, that often conceive of crossing the boundaries between literature and painting. On the one hand, the presence of the painter Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse allows Woolf to explore manifold aesthetic and psychological issues that represent serious concerns for herself as a writer, and can be seen as an opportunity to consider the fundamental aspects of her own artistic vision; on the other hand, the presence of a novelist (Woolf herself) in some of Vanessa Bell’s paintings may be interpreted as a prefiguration of her sister’s mature aesthetic principles, which are surprisingly reflected – along with the tenets of Post-Impressionism that fascinated them both – in her own painterly technique.

Surrealist Cross-Pollinations and Confrontations of Image and Text in Paul Éluard and Max Ernst’s ‘Les Malheurs des immortels’
Lauren Van Arsdall
doi:10.59860/wph.a58bdfb

This article examines a book of texts and collages by Surrealist poet Paul Éluard and artist Max Ernst composed using a new verbo-visual approach to automatic writing. My analysis of Les Malheurs des immortels concerns their collaborative process of making verbal and visual collage. This article argues that Les Malheurs des immortels, on the one hand, systematically fuses the thoughts of two writers, and on the other hand, alludes to a fracture of the poetic self, a new way of making poetry using more than one voice and set of eyes. The double, considered as a contextual condition (Ernst and Éluard working together) and compositional device (two media in one book) poses a unique challenge for the reader: the texts, in attempting to re-inscribe a reality that is already expressed by a visual code, initiate a correspondence with the image based on phonetic and graphic associations. By focusing on the scientific imagery of one verbo-visual set entitled ‘Entre les deux pôles de la politesse,’ I seek to reinvigorate an ongoing conversation about the appropriation of scientific diagrams and language by Surrealist poets. In doing so, this article also stakes a claim for the relationship between popular science and Surrealist poetic practices in order to evaluate Éluard and Ernst’s redefinition of automatic writing. To this end, my article fits into a wider research project investigating Surrealist works dismissed as purely nonsensical as well as recently discovered Surrealist poets who worked consistently and collaboratively with artists on poetry collections (e.g., Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Paul Éluard and Man Ray).

Michel Butor’s ‘Les Mots dans la peinture’: A ‘Museum of Words’?
Elizabeth Geary Keohane
doi:10.59860/wph.a69b242

This article examines Michel Butor's 1969 work Les Mots dans la peinture, asserting that its inventive structure has been largely passed over by critics due to its primary use as a key text in word-image studies. Butor proposes to examine words in paintings in this work and in so doing, focuses at length on the museum space. I suggest that Butor’s text sets itself up as an imaginary art museum for its reader, and organises itself spatially in such a way as to emulate the visitor’s passage through an exhibition space. Butor thus creates what will be termed, following James A.W. Heffernan, a ‘museum of words’, ‘a gallery of art constructed by language alone’.1 In arguing that the museum space informs the structure as much as the content of Les Mots dans la peinture, my article also offers insights into the work's interrogation both of ekphrasis and the role of illustration. Moreover, this piece’s sensitivity to Butor’s poetic endeavours and experimentation with the essay form, as well as to his thoughts on the interconnected activities of writing, reading, and travelling, further challenges the way in which the aesthetic value of Les Mots dans la peinture in its own right has long been overlooked.

‘La transgression ne m’intéresse pas, pour le dire brutalement’: Michel Houellebecq, critic of transgression
Russell Williams
doi:10.59860/wph.a6b6061

Critics of contemporary French novelist Michel Houellebecq have frequently used the adjective ‘transgressive’ in their descriptions of both the man and his work. There are, however, huge differences of both order and magnitude between the notion of transgression in the writing of the provocative novelist and that theorised systematically in the work of the Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille, archetypical avatars of transgression. Houellebecq has even gone on record to declare his disgust at what he perceives as the synonymy between cruelty and transgression in their work and ‘transgressive’ visual art more broadly. Nonetheless, Houellebecq’s fiction does display a constant preoccupation with both transgression and the transgressive: he is drawn to both the obscene and the unacceptable. This article, which forms part of my ongoing research into the less canonical or less explored strands of Houellebecq’s work, considers the representation of both sex and transgressive contemporary visual art as represented in Houellebecq’s fiction. It demonstrates how Houellebecq’s writing maintains a critical dialogue with transgression, in particular in the work of the Vienna Actionists, Damien Hirst and, more implicitly, Jake and Dinos Chapman. It also touches on the author’s writing about art and his description of his own death, at the hands of a crazed art collector, in La Carte et le territoire (2010). As a result, it demonstrates how the image of a moralising author emerges in his work. It also considers how Houellebecq’s stance can be closely aligned with those of critics Ovidie and Paul Virilio. To conclude, it considers how the author formulates a specifically Houellebecquian notion of transgression, or an aesthetics to which art and writing should aspire, which resonates with the Roland Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977).