Ronja Tripp Books

This book challenges the focus on pictoriality as central constituent of visual culture from the perspective of literary studies, which in the wake of an ‘intermedial turn’ so far focused on the ways texts relate to pictures and visual media either in praesentia (e. g. word and image studies) or in absentia (e. g. ekphrasis). Instead, it emphasizes literature’s participation in visual culture at large and focuses on three areas of investigation: (1) the depiction of, for instance, visual perceptions in the literary mode of description, which is paramount to formatting the mental aspect of visual culture; (2) the readerly practice of visualising situations and events of the fictional world, which mediates between those mentefacts and techniques of writing; (3) textual visibilities which are grounded in materiality. The volume explores these three areas from a systematically integrated perspective and the essays include in-depth treatments of seminal examples taken from Western literatures (primarily English and German, but also French and American literature) from early modern times to the present. This book’s aim is to work out literature’s active role in shaping visual culture, thus demonstrating its relevance for “image studies”.

Wittgenstein‘s critique of philosophy often employed the notion of images. His various remarks on ethics and religion seem to suggest that we live in, and base our decisions on, images; it is simply part of our human form of life. Moreover, from his earliest writings Wittgenstein continually suggests that ethics cannot be captured propositionally, but that it is found in ways of seeing the world or in images which ‚hold us captive‘. This collection will examine the role of imagery, symbolism and iconic practices in Wittgenstein‘s ethical thought, and thus contributes to the on-going, vital interest in Wittgensteinian ethics on the one hand, as well as to the recent debates on his notions in visual culture studies on the other. The papers combine these two fields of interest and provide fresh insight by approaching these issues from a philosophical as well as media and cultural studies perspective.

This study offers, firstly, a model for literary visuality and visualizations based on reception theory. It takes its cues from phenomenological reception aesthetics and combines the central notion of meaning being “imagistic in character” (Iser) with concepts from cultural theory (such as symbolic forms) as well as from recent picture theory, media studies, and cognitive narratology. Several concepts and analytical categories are developed and tested heuristically in the case studies, such as logic of disruption, scenes of observation, or narrative strategies of visualizations. Secondly, the novels Vile Bodies (Waugh), Brighton Rock (Greene) and Burmese Days (Orwell) offer a complementary insight into interwar literary visuality. The novels are concerned with visuality both on a thematic and structural level. Additionally, the narrative strategies take readerly visualizations into account. Those strategies challenge not only practices of seeing or politics of visual concepts, but also evoke literary precursors and their visualizations. Hence, this study contributes to a yet unwritten history of literary visuality and suggests furthermore the notion of visual intertextuality.