JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to New Literary History. I URING that period of the nineteenth century when description, the virtues of which had been rediscovered, seemed to make literature the direct extension of painting, Eugene Fromentin, himself both painter and writer, insisted, quite to the contrary, on the difference between the two arts:There can be no doubt that the plastic art has its own laws, limits, conditions of existence, in a word, its own domain. I saw equally strong reasons why literature should reserve and preserve its own domain. An idea can be expressed equally in both mediums, provided that it lends itself or is adapted to each. But I saw that an idea's chosen form, and I mean its literary form, demanded neither something better, nor something more than written language offers. There are forms for the spirit, as there are forms for the eyes; the language that speaks to the eyes is not that which speaks to the spirit. And the book is there, not to repeat the painter's work, but rather to express what that work does not say.' In this same preface to the 1874 edition of Un 6te dans le Sahara (A Summer in the Sahara) and Une annee dans le Sahel (A Year in the Sahel),Fromentin revealed the origin of the confusion that he condemned in the writers of his era: the traditional hierarchy of the pictorial genres, in which historical painting occupied the major place, had been replaced by a conception that gave landscape painting an importance that it had never had before:French painting had already bec-i renewed and generally honored by a school that was extraordinarily full of life, attentive, sagacious, gifted with a sense of observation that was, at the very least, more subtle, with a sensibility that was more acute. This school, like all the others, had its masters, its disciples, and already its idolaters. One saw better than ever, they said; a thousand details hitherto unknown were revealed. The palette was richer, the design had more physiognomy. Living nature could at last be considered for the first time in a largely faithful image, and be recognized in its infinite metamorphoses.... It is not surprising that such a movement, occurring This content downloaded from 188.72.126.55 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 05:14:37 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions NEW LITERARY HISTORY simultaneously with contemporary literature, should have had an influence upon the latter, and that our writers, themselves sensitive, dreaming, burning, their eyes wide open like ours, regarding such examples, experiencing such needs, should also have been eager to enrich their palettes and to fill them with the color...
Interdisciplinary studies on ‘Text and Image’, which began in the 1970s, have now taken on a position of some importance. They pick up and develop those theories which, from the 15th to the 17th centuries, considered the association of the arts in terms of the Horatian ‘Ut pictura poesis’. These studies, however, confront a major theoretical difficulty, inherent in the retention of Euclidean categories in our conception of vision and painting. A comparison with cultures in which the ideogram flourishes—in particular those of China and Japan—should allow this difficulty to be resolved.
Résumé Une des particularités des médias numériques est la possibilité qu’ils offrent d’associer texte et image sur un même support. Cette mixité étant également la caractéristique principe des écritures dites « idéographiques », l’hypothèse qui est ici avancée est que, en interrogeant les sociétés qui ont inventé ces systèmes, on pourra définir le type de mémoire culturelle que proposent les nouveaux médias. Or il s’avère que la fonction première de cette mémoire n’est pas l’archivage des données mais l’aide à la création. C’est ce que confirme, dans la civilisation de l’alphabet, la section de la rhétorique consacrée à la mémoire.
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