KL: Birgit Neumann: Pushing Narrative to its Limits: Ekphrasis and Visuality in Teju Cole's Fiction

My talk sets out to investigate visual practices in Teju Cole’s fiction, illustrating how an engagement with verbal-visual relations adds to our understanding of narrativity and reading experience. I argue that the evocation of visual practices in Anglophone fiction constitutes an act of intermedial and transcultural translation, which both acknowledges the influence of circulating aesthetic models and subjects them to creative processes of ex-change. Verbal-visual relations open up a site of in-between-ness, a site of contact, contest and translation, in which different material-semiotic practices coexist in mutually transformative patterns. Constantly pushing verbal narratives towards their limits and confronting them with their inherent alterity, ekphrastic configurations bring in the ethico-political: They introduce an excessive rest, “a surplus energy” (Louvel 2011), that reflects critically upon existing orders of the sayable and visible, and exposes readers to the potentiality of materiality. As verbal-visual relations thrive on the exteriority of material-semiotic operations, they reveal the latencies of existing orders and call for an acceptance of the other. In this way, verbal-visual configurations may intervene in the social fabric of existing narrative patterns, reworking them in a way that allows readers to experience and imagine the world differently. These transgressive aesthetic practices challenge us to explore new understandings of narrative.

Prof. Dr. Birgit Neumann (Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Literary Translation, Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf)