Transmedial Creation of Text Worlds. Pictorial Narration in Response to Verbal Texts

Abstract

With the narrative and visual turn engaging research in several scholarly disciplines over the last decades, the author of this article intends to approach the issue of world-formation in such pictorial representations that have originated in response to verbal texts, mostly literary. The study assumes a semiotic vantage point, with text understood broadly as any meaningful sequence or network of signs. It draws also from Intermedial Studies, following in particular the idea of media transformation (transmediation) as proposed by Lars Elleström (2014), especially in application to “qualified” media such as artistic forms. An analysis will be carried on the set of images (mostly Western paintings and one instance of Oriental sculpture) produced by 19th and 20th-century artists, all induced by well-known verbal narratives that represent three categories: a) Greek mythology, b) religious and literary-religious texts (The New Testament, the Rāmāyana) and c) English-language literature (drama and poetry). As such, these visual renditions — a reversal of traditionally conceived ekphrasis in which verbal descriptions commented on visual artefacts — qualify as transmedial phenomena. The author’s main concern is to what extent storytelling static visual works, the instances of secondary narrativity (Stampoulidis, 2019), are capable of creating text worlds (partly) similar to storyworlds postulated for verbal narratives. Starting with her own taxonomy of picturing endowed with a narratorial potential (inspired by several typologies proposed for narrative images), the author will discuss the formation by pictorial means of two world-building units, namely: 1) scenes and 2) small worlds/sub-worlds, both of them only parts of full-blown text worlds. Temporality emerges as a foundational but not exclusive property of text worlds in the verbal and pictorial arts. This study is a continuation of the author’s previous research (Chrzanowska-Kluczewska, 2009, 2016, 2019) that points to an incremental growth of possible worlds into text worlds into discourse worlds in verbal and visual media.