The Future of Text and Image: Collected Essays on Literary and Visual Conjunctures

The question of the relation between the visual and the textual in literature is at the heart of an increasing number of scholarly projects, and in turn, the investigation of evolving visual-verbal dynamics is becoming an independent discipline. This volume explores these profound literary shifts through the work of twelve talented, and in some cases, emerging scholars who study text and image relations in diverse forms and contexts. The inter-medial conjunctures investigated in this book play with and against the traditional roles of the visual and the verbal. The Future of Text and Image presents explorations of the incorporation of visual elements into works of literature, of visual writing modes, and of the textuality and literariness of images. It focuses on the special potential literature offers for the combination of these two functions. Alongside examinations of major forms and genres such as memoirs, novels, and poetry, this volume expands the discussion of text and image relations into more marginal forms, for instance, collage books, the PostSecret collections of anonymous postcards, and digital poetry. In other words, while exploring the destiny of text and image as an independent discipline, this volume simultaneously looks at the very literal future of text and image forms in an ever-changing technological reality. The essays in this book will help to define the emergent practices and politics of this growing field of study, and at the same time, reflect the tremendous significance of the visual in today's image culture.

Ofra Amihay is a doctoral candidate at New York University, working on text and image relations in Modern Hebrew novels. Her interests include Hebrew and Jewish literature, German literature, visual culture, text and image relations, children’s literature, and questions of identity and gender. She has taught Modern Hebrew at NYU, and has published in Prooftexts and Teoria uvikoret (Theory and Criticism). Her article on comics representations of the Holocaust and the Berlin Wall is forthcoming in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. In spring 2011 she was a fellow at the Franz Rosenzweig Center of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Lauren Walsh is a lecturer in the Literary Studies department at Eugene Lang College at The New School in New York City. Her interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, media studies, and memory studies. She has published on diverse topics, from the modernist influences on the American southern novelist Albert Murray (in Albert Murray and the Aesthetic Imagination of a Nation, University of Alabama Press, 2010) to the treatment of September 11th photos in cultural memory and contemporary fiction (in the About Images series of Nomadikon, 2011). She has also written for Photography and Culture as well as the Los Angeles Review of Books. She holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University.