Zivley's article also examines the influence of images on Plath's poetry. Whereas Bryant discusses how Plath reworks the codes of consumer culture in advertising, Zivley traces the sources of Plath's poems back to particular modernist paintings and examines the various ways the poet transforms these art works into poems. At times when a painting would spark a vital insight into her own life, Plath would conflate memories of a painting with emotionally charged personal experiences. (She admitted that art was "her deepest source of inspiration.") Plath's descriptive or indirect references to specific paintings fit neatly into Genette's subcategory of allusion, but, more interesting is the inspiration the paintings provoke in Plath in the form of "emotional recognition of parallel visual and emotional analogies between art works and her own social, familial, and emotional experiences." Ekphrastic poems such as Plath's and John Keats's famous "Ode on a Grecian Urn" are inspired by images or objects, which usually trigger strong emotions or profound insights in the poet. Jean Hagstrum defines ekphrasis succinctly as "giving voice and language to the otherwise mute object" (1958, 18). The mood or idea that an artwork inspires in the poet (and reader) is more significant, of course, than any accurate poetic description of the object.
Jennifer Cushman also explores how images, in this case, Russian icons, inspired poems in "Beyond Ekphrasis: Logos and Eikon in Rilke's poetry." Cushman borrows Amy Golahny's definition of ekphrasis as a "text that expresses the poet-reader-viewer reaction to actual or imagined works of art" which widens the ekphrasis debate into the speculative realms of writer- intent and reader-response (1996, 13). (4) In her discussion of the inspiration of Russian icons on Rilke's works, she links theories of ekphrasis with that of Orthodox icon theology. If the former deals with the potential for art to impact life directly, then the latter views "the function of the icon to make the scriptural word palpable, to occasion a change in perception, and ultimately the behavior of the believer." In particular, the icon serves as a "window between the earthly and celestial worlds" that conveys divine light and transforms the viewer; its colors in particular were to convey this spiritual presence. Similarly, Rilke, who consider ed the poet as a priest/artist, felt it was the artist's duty to bring the spiritual into corporeal existence. In his famous "Duineser Elegies" and "Life of Maria" ("Marienleben"), Rilke invokes the holiness of the angels and the Madonna sometimes through use of color. Cushman concludes that Rilke's poems do not merely describe the icons ekphrastically; rather, he constructs the poem to reproduce the experience of contemplating an icon by inspiring in the reader contemplation and revelation. The intertextual relationship between the Russian icons that inspired Rilke and his poems seems too strong to reduce it to a mere "allusion," one of Genette's categories of intertextuality.
If iconic representations of Mary inspired Rilke's poems, then the Biblical description of the Annunciation scene in which the angel Gabriel announces to Mary that she will become the mother of God inspired a plethora of paintings, the theme of Susan van Rohr Scaff's essay "The Virgin Annunciate in Italian Art of the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance." One can frame the changing depictions of the Madonna in terms of shifting codes. Medieval portrayals of Mary reflect the cult of adoration that surrounded the Madonna in the Middle Ages in which she was regarded as a veritable goddess of popular worship. Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation, on the other hand, reinterpret Mary as both the chaste virgin of the Bible and as a descendant of Eve, a paragon of feminine beauty, even, in some cases, an object of erotic desire. The variety of reinterpretations of the Annunciation scene support Kristeva's valuable contribution to the debate on intertextuality that "no intertextual citation is ever innocent or direct , but always transformed, distorted, displaced, condensed, or edited in some way in order to suit the speaking subject's value system" (Morgan 1985, 22). In this case, the transformation of Mary's role in the Annunciation scene from demure virgin, to alluring young woman not only reflects the painter's incorporation of his society's codes concerning her human and spiritual identity, but also his society's stance towards religion. Her increasingly physical attractiveness in the later Renaissance depictions reveals that society's increasingly secular values, its shift in focus from the spiritual to the human.
Similarly, in "Art, Literature and the Harlem Renaissance: The Messages of God's Trombones," Anne Carroll demonstrates how African-Americans' reinterpretation of Biblical scenes in their poetry and the visual arts marks a shift away from conventional codes of the dominant culture to an emphasis on their own culture. In God's Trombones, a collection of poems by James Weldon Johnson with illustrations by Aaron Douglas, both artists emphasize the importance of blacks in Biblical history by drawing attention to and redressing the traditional omission of African-Americans from these narratives. Carroll discusses how African-Americans of the Harlem Renaissance attempted to subvert the artistic conventions of mainstream American society in their art as depicted in Johnson's poetic and Douglas's visual representations of black preachers' sermons. Their artistic revisions of established Biblical myths along with the subversion of traditional aesthetic codes can be formulated in terms of the conflicting values and disc ourses of a dominant majority and a subordinate minority. Carroll also examines the interactions between the visual and the written texts. She analyzes how the illustrations serve as a visual counterpoint to the poems and reinforce certain aspects of their message. Douglas's pictures underline meanings only suggested in the poetry and complement the poems' attempt to challenge established representations of African-Americans. Because the illustrations serve as commentary on the poems, one could argue that they have a "metatextual" (Genette's term) relationship to the poetry. Moreover, the juxtaposition of poem and illustration underscores the various ways in which each medium represents the sermons. Carroll states that Johnson's poetic innovations demonstrate his manipulation of formal elements of poetry to reflect aspects of the preachers' delivery, while the illustrations suggest movement and vitality by arresting figures in motion.
The distinctive ways in which each medium reinterprets an idea or a scene prompt a brief discussion of the debate on the fundamental differences (and similarities) of literature and the visual arts, a distinction made by Aristotle and a central concern of any study of interarts relations. In modern times, it was the influential Enlightenment theatre critic and theorist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing who established essentialist categories between poetry and the visual arts in his seminal essay "Laokoon' which refers both to a famous Hellenistic sculpture as well as to Virgil's work. Lessing associated temporality with literature and spatiality with painting and sculpture. Moreover, he privileged literature over art when he argued that the artist, unlike the writer, could only portray a single moment in time and then from only one point of view. As Bryan Wolf points out, conventional associations of the visual with nonverbal immediacy consign the visual arts to the "myth of presentness," Lessing's spatiality, wherea s the modern world associates rhetoric, which implies a manipulation of "facts" or words in order to influence, exclusively with language (1990, 185). Wolf agrees with Tom Mitchell who states that "there is no essential difference between poetry and painting" and argues that "painting is no less rhetorical or ideological in its structure than literature" (1986, 184). Wolf cites Emerson's assertion that the sister arts of painting and literature are united in a common rhetorical structure and that all forms of knowledge are socially mediated in order to suggest a tradition distinct from Lessing's, one that is "concerned not to distinguish painting from literature but to reunify them under the common banner of representation" (1990, 198-99). He states that no act of perception can ever be innocent or original, that "the key to the interpretive process does not lie in the nature of the object interpreted" and that "painting and literature alike must be engaged as rhetorical constructs" (191). His assertion that both a poem and a painting are "part of a circuit of meanings, a signifying system" reflects the influence of Kristeva and Barthes and incorporates a study of interart relations into the earlier discussion of intertextualty.
The last two essays deal with a particular type of intertextuality, Genette's "hypertextuality," which refers to any relationship uniting one text to an earlier one and which suggests the concepts of influence and sources. In "Modernity's Revision of the Dancing Daughter: The Salome Narrative of Wilde and Strauss," Carmen Trammell Skaggs examines Wilde's appropriation of the Bibilical Salome legend as well as Richard Strauss's transformation of Wilde's text into the libretto for his opera. Jeffrey Adams analyzes Orson Welles's film adaptation of Franz Kafka's novel in "Orson Welles's The Trial: Film Noir and the Kafkaesque." Both articles discuss how social discourses--political/social ideology or cinematic codes--respectively, influenced Strauss's and Welles's reinterpretation of anterior texts. anti-Semitism, orientalist views, and the cult of decadence colored either Wilde's dramatic or Strauss's musical versions of the Salome figure. Welles deliberately appropriates the style and codes of expressionist fi lm and film noir in his cinematic interpretation of the Kafkaesque.
In her discussion of Wilde's and Strauss's texts, Skaggs seeks to demonstrate how each "individual interpreter reacts and responds to the cultural and artistic ideologies of his own time." The Decadent writer and homosexual Wilde develops the themes of orientalism and counter-cultural ethics in his reworking of the Salome and John the Baptist love story of thwarted desire and perverse revenge in order to present a social critique of gender ideologies and notions of sexuality. Strauss, who attended a performance of Wilde's Salome in Max Reinhardt's "Kleines Theatre" in Berlin, reacts to nineteenth-century German culture by reinterpreting Wilde's perverse sexual themes and by caricaturing Jews in an anti-Semitic reinterpretation of orientalism. Just as the changing values that accompanied the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance influenced depictions of the Madonna, so too, the sexual and racial codes of fin-de-siecle England and Wilhelmine Germany inspired different portrayals of Salome. If Wilde challenges sexual and gender ideologies, then Strauss depicts in his opera the prevailing racism of his society.
In his visual reinterpretation of Kafka's expressionist novel The Trial, Welles employs the cinematic idiom of German Expressionist film (which influenced the film noir style) especially such mise-en-scene techniques as a claustrophobic set design, oblique camera angles, and a chiaroscuro of light and shadow. Welles replicates Kafka's violations of the conventions of literary realism in his novel with his expressionist/film noir style, which subverts established codes of cinematic realism to achieve a destabilizing effect on the audience. Just as Rilke attempts to reproduce the spiritual experience of Russian icons in his poetry, so, too, Welles replicates the Kafkaesque mood of claustrophobic paranoia, of uncertainty and anxiety, of emotional entrapment and guilt, and of disorientation through his appropriation of the film noir style. Welles's imaginative portrayal of Kafka's text on the screen illustrates Baxandall's observation that the successor is not a passive recipient of a predecessor's ideas, techniq ues, or themes, but, rather, is an active agent who reworks the precursor's material to produce a masterpiece in its own right.
Conclusion
The study of interarts relations has become an acknowledged branch of Comparative Literature in the United States, and elsewhere with societies, journals, and conferences devoted to the study of interarts relations (Weisstein 1993, 1). (5) Moreover, a new notion of intertextuality ignores the boundaries between art and non-art (Morgan 1985, 34). Recent studies of the semiotics of culture have focused on the intertextuality between aesthetic and social texts. An intertextual, interdisciplinary study of related domains of knowledge marks a radical departure from Lessing's division of the arts into distinct categories and from the sharply defined boundaries among disciplines instituted with the medieval universities and offers a creative approach to the study of literature and the arts.
Notes
(1.) Morgan Thais provides a cogent and succinct overview of the development of the theory and practice of intertextuality. He focuses on European and some American theorists including Bakhtin, Kristeva, Frye, Bloom, de Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Derrida, Barthes, Riffaterre, and Genette. His article also contains a thoroughly researched bibliography. Key ideas of my preliminary discussion of historicism vs. intertextuality and of Bakhtin are culled from his detailed study. An updated book-length history of intertextuality is Graham Allen's (2000) which contains chapters on Sausurre, Bakhtin, Kristeva; Barthes; Genette and Riffaterre; Bloom, feminism and postcolonialism; and postmodernism. Space limits restrict my discussion to a few key scholars.
(2.) I am indebted to Allen's succinct summary of these three voluminous works (2000). The first two volumes were originally published in 1979 and 1982, respectively, the original publication date of the third was not available.
(3.) I will consider the three that are relevant to a discussion of this issue's essays, which are all discussed in Palimpsests. The other two are "architextuality" and "paratextuality". The former term refers to a reader's generic, modal, thematic, and figurative expectations about texts and his/her reception of a work (Allen 2000, 102-03). For example, the reader may expect that a certain work will imitate such generic models as tragedy, comedy, the realist novel, or the lyric. "Paratextuality," refers to those elements that lie on the "threshold" of the text. This threshold consists of a "peritext" including titles, chapter titles, prefaces, dedications, inscriptions, notes, and epigraphs, and an "epitext" that includes elements "outside" of the text such as interviews, publicity announcements, critical reviews, and editorial discussions (103-07).
(4.) For an excellent discussion of ekphrasis see Heffernan (1991) and Yacobi (2000).
(5.) Journals that promote studies of interarts relations include Word and Image and Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature.
Works Cited
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-----. 1997a. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Trans. Channa Newman and Claude Dabinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
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Landwehr is Associate Professor of German at West Chester University. She has published articles on Heinrich von Kleist and works by fin-de-siecle writers such as Arthur Schnitzler and Josef Roth.
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