Words and Images: A French Rendez-vous

New essays translated from the French, exploring “word-and-image” studies—a vibrant interdisciplinary field that builds on trends in linguistic analysis, visual semiotics, and more

Words and images interact with each other in art and everyday life and do so in many different ways. Building on recent trends in linguistic analysis and visual semiotics, a vibrant interdisciplinary field of inquiry called “word-and-image studies” has developed over the past few decades. Much of this new scholarship, however, has originated in the French-speaking world and thus has not been available in English – until now.

Words and Images: A French Rendez-vous features six new essays translated from the French by Anthony Wall. These explorations spin an adventurous web through time – from the very beginnings of human language on prehistoric cave walls, to the textual background of early modern and Enlightenment art, to the coexistence of a poem and a coloured drawing on an exterior wall in contemporary Paris – and through interdisciplinary space, from archaeology and anthropology to art history, literary and communications theory, and philosophy of mind.

The volume concludes with a bibliographical essay that provides an extensive summary of the most recent critical studies undertaken in France, Belgium, and Canada.

With Contributions By Marie-Dominique Popelard, Bruno Nassam Aboudrar, Anthony Wall, Stephanie Lojkine, Pierre Civil, and Beatrice Frankel

Anthony Wall is University Professor in the Department of French, Italian, and Spanish at the University of Calgary. He has published extensively in the areas of comparative literature, literary theory and the philosophy of language, and the French Enlightenment.

List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction

Obscure Objects of Depiction and Description: The Example of Alechinsky’s and Bonnefoy’s Painted Wall (Rue Descartes, Paris)
Marie-Dominique Popelard

Mary Magdalene in the Village of Emmaus: Notes on Two Paintings by Laurent de La Hyre
Bruno Nassin Aboudrar

Painting the Readers of the Eighteenth Century
Anthony Wall

The Decisive Movement
Stephanie Lojkine

On the Strategies of Portraiture in the Images and Texts of Seventeenth-Century Spain
Pierre Civil

The Invention of Prehistoric Rock Art: A Visual Experience
Beatrice Fraenkel

Word-and-Image Studies in France: A Biographical Essay

Other Cited (But Unillustrated) Works of Art
Colour Plates
Index