Offering a major contribution to the field of American culture and aesthetics in an interdisciplinary frame, this collection assembles the cutting-edge research of renowned and emerging scholars in literature and the visual arts, with a foreword by Miles Orvell. The volume represents the first of its kind: an intervention in current interdisciplinary approaches to the intersections of the written word and the visual image that moves beyond standard theoretical approaches to consider the written and visual artwork in embodied, cognitive and experiential terms. Tracing a strong lineage of pragmatism, romanticism, surrealism and dada in American intermedial works through the nineteenth century to the present day, the editors and authors of this volume chart a new and vital methodology for the study and appreciation of the correspondences between visual and verbal practices.
Mixed messages presents and interrogates ten distinct moments from the arts of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century America where visual and verbal forms blend and clash. Charting correspondences concerned with the expression and meaning of human experience, this volume moves beyond standard interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to consider the written and visual artwork in embodied, cognitive and contextual terms.Offering a genuinely interdisciplinary contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, avant-garde studies, word-image relations, and literary studies, Mixed messages takes in architecture, notebooks, poetry, painting, conceptual art, contemporary art, comic books, photographs and installations, ending with a speculative conclusion on the role of the body in the experience of digital mixed media. Each of the ten case studies explores the juxtaposition of visual and verbal forms in a manner that moves away from treating verbal and visual symbols as operating in binary or oppositional systems and towards a consideration of mixed media, multi-media and intermedia work as brought together in acts of creation, exhibition, reading, viewing and immersion. The collection advances research into embodiment theory, affect, pragmatist aesthetics, as well as into the continuing legacy of romanticism and of dada, conceptual art and surrealism in an American context.This book will be valuable to scholars and students of American literature and the visual arts.With a foreword by Professor Miles Orvell of Temple University, Gander and Garland's collection assembles cutting-edge research of renowned and emerging scholars in American literature and the visual arts, including Lauren Weingarden and Caroline Blinder.
