“Introduction: Towards an Alternative Poetics of Intermediality”
The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have witnessed an intermedial dialogue between verbal, visual, and vocal representations, alongside the radical and contemporary avant-garde art movements. What sets avant-gardism apart from traditional representationalism are its distinct attributes of revitalising the ‘collective dimension of explorative creativity’ and employing ‘[inter]artistic activity as the means for opening up new territory’ (Sers and Eburne 849). Grounded in these principles of formal innovation and generic transgression, both literary and artistic historiography reveals a notable departure from the classical tenet of Horace’s ut pictura poesis towards the notion of intermediality – a confluence rather than the ‘ancient parallel’ (MacLeod 194), particularly evident in the early modernist experimentation of Imagism and Vorticism. Ezra Pound’s ideogram, Wyndham Lewis’s vortex, William Carlos Williams’s ekphrasis, Elizabeth Bishop’s perspectivism, and Gertrude Stein’s portraiture, all share an inspiration drawn from the material and technical innovations of modern art and mass media. Through a continuous and inventive interchange between various artforms and mediums, ranging from painting, architecture, photography, texture, novel, musical, theatre, and cinema, modern and contemporary writers opt to reconstruct their textual works by adopting a non-representational technique.