"An Art of Recalcitrant Words"
Written by: Allyson Purpura (Krannert Art Museum)
In 1995, art historian Griselda Pollack insisted, “We need not a history of looked at objects, not vision with its seeming autonomy, but a history of the politics of looking.” Among other works in visual culture studies written since then, Tom’s book does just that by writing a history – or creating a genealogy – of visible texts – one that confounds the very premise of texts as primarily readable, medial things. In particular, he does this by exploring how technologies of (re)production bear on the object-hood of the text – and on their reception by those who encounter it.
I wanted to bring Tom’s project into conversation with a number of visual artists who use text in their work that, like the Frank’s Casket and comics, “subverts the norms of writing, and challenges the conventions of seeing and reading” (as Simon Morley once put it.) Fragmented, heaped, or tumbled across the picture plane, their renegade script slips easily between word and image. Upsetting the relationship between signifier/signified, it flourishes in the space between legibility and opacity – precisely, I think, what Tom identifies as Derrida’s gap or deferral between written text and its content. [If time allows, we can have a peek at the work of Robert Smithson, Wosene Kosrof, Fathi Hassan, and Willem Boshoff.]
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"Comics: Immedia et Realia"
Written by Shawn Gilmore (English)
The arguments that Thomas Bredehot puts forward in The Visible Text provide a new and valuable model by which we might reconfigure our notions of the long history of textual production, while also quite usefully highlighting the tension between the textual and paratextual components of various text objects, exposing the linked and shifting relationship between production and reproduction within various eras in the history of print. As a scholar of comics and graphic narratives, I am drawn to Bredehoft’s rather bold claims about the role that comics play at the end of his genealogy of textual forms. So, in what follows, I want to briefly highlight what I read as the key to Bredehoft’s conception of comics, and then move (somewhat tendentiously) to two challenges that this definition poses if we are to move forward with his schema in mind.
Bredehoft’s argument dismisses some traditional assumptions about the aesthetic logic of comics—including the basic assumption that comics are imagetexts and the more foundational assumption that comics constitute a medium—as he carefully delineates comics from the logic of both the facsimile and the edition. Instead, he draws comics into a long history of printed textual works, focusing on the contiguity of their printed forms (including comics books and graphic novels) with previous modes of textual production. What differs with comics, argues Bredehoft, is the relationship between text and paratext, held together by a unified material publishing form—in short, that comics artists are able to blur the typically fixed relationship between text and paratext, which allows them to integrate their work in ways that sets their comics apart from the markers that establish the legitimacy of traditional textual categories, such as the facsimile or the edition.
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"The Posture of the Copy"
Written by Bonnie Mak (Library & Information Science and Medieval Studies)
I am pleased to have been invited to respond to Thomas Bredehoft’s presentation, because it offers an opportunity to think about the nature of textual transmission across a range of time periods, platforms, and genres, and to consider the question of reproduction, which has re-emerged in the last decade, owing in part to our new-found ability to make, share, and use digital representations of historical objects and texts with relative ease.
As Dr. Bredehoft points out, the Middle Ages offers us an alternative understanding of the transmission of text, one that operates outside the stemmatic ideologies of the last century. In this alternative model, the active excerpting and re-mixing of authoritative works is encouraged, and is more significantly the way in which one could demonstrate virtuosity. This creative mode of textual transmission – in which commonly-held knowledge is re-crafted and re-purposed – suggests that text itself is not necessarily a thing to be reproduced, but is instead a call to action; a site of production; a place of aesthetic experience.
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