Anniversary Workshop: Birgit Neumann: New Directions in the Study of Culture and Narration: Verbal-Visual Configurations in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction

In the workshop, we will discuss how verbal-visual relations in contemporary Anglophone fiction explore the notorious elasticity of narratives. As verbal-visual configurations play on material-semiotic otherness, they encourage us to come up with new understandings of the form and cultural role performed by narratives. The topical interest of many contemporary Anglophone literatures in movement and migration, travelling cultures and transitory spaces, migratory subjectivities and nomadic epistemologies is reflected in a visual aesthetics that opens up contact zones and sites of in-between-ness. Time and again, literary visuality and ekphrastic strategies are employed to stage relations, interconnections and exchange across different, seemingly self-contained entities. Constituting an arena for all kinds of possible interrelations and attachments, verbal-visual configurations therefore become central to what the French philosopher Jacques Rancière (2004, 13) called the “distribution of the sensible”, understood as “the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience.” Moreover, as verbal-visual configurations introduce frictions that exceed representation, they call for new reading practices, namely for a reading of affect and intensity. We will discuss how verbal-visual relations disrupt the absorption of narrative “into function and meaning” (Massumi 2002, 28) and how they foster new relations between text and reader.