New Ekphrastic Poetics

The ‘visual turn’ has been foundational and formative for literature studies, for word-and-image research, and, increasingly, for cultural studies, including Thing theory.1 Over the past twenty years researchers across the broad modern period in French studies have engaged in the innovative study of visual–verbal relations, with particular emphasis on literary impressionism, avant-garde poetics, Surrealism, and the nouveau roman.2 Discipline-defining work by Hal Foster on Surrealism's death-bound beauty in literature and art, and by Mieke Bal on reading Proust visually, has complemented Derrida's work on the displacement of the traditional boundaries between art and theory, Foucault's assessment of the significance of Manet for twentieth-century non-representationalist art, and Michel Butor's engagement with intermedial art from words-in-painting, through textual–visual boundaries in the study of Montaigne, to collaborative practice (cascades of livres d'artistes) with painters from Pierre Alechinksy to Jasper Johns.3 As the visual turn becomes more pronounced (becomes a swerve?) in the academy, so it is producing changes in institutional infrastructure and nourishing collaborative research and advanced-level teaching.4 Increasingly, the mainstreaming of visual culture studies as an invigorated interdisciplinary area capable of reaching out to diverse audiences within and beyond the academy is achieving recognition, forging partnerships, stimulating outreach, and influencing funding allocations in French and francophone studies in the UK. Challenging unitary constructions of ‘French’ art, the Arts Council-funded project ‘Channel’ (University of Sheffield, 2006) involved contemporary artists from France, Algeria, and Quebec (Djamel Tatah, Valérie Jouve, Natacha Lesueur) in a multicultural, multimedia exploration of themes of nomadism, migration, and settlement.5 More recently, the project ‘Post-Colonial Negotiations: Visualising the Franco-Algerian Relationship in the Post-War Period’ (2008–2011), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), has begun to map the visual mediation (through film, video, photography, and television) of the relationship between the two nations.6