Literature, interarts, and multimodality in the narrative of Seán Virgo: a transmedial inquiry into pictorial, architectural, theatrical, musical, and iconotextual tranfers stars

Resumen

This dissertation offers an encompassing analysis of the enormous potential that artistic transfers have in the current projections of literature and the new designs of ekphrasis. With that aim, it delves into a lush interartistic oeuvre: the fictional world of poet and writer Seán Virgo. The transmedial areas explored embrace transliterations from the motley art fields of book illustration, painting, architecture, theatre, and music into fiction. Chapter 1 installs the theoretical setup and assesses the profoundly artistic philosophy underlying Seán Virgo's creation. Chapter 2 scopes referential critique of the children's picturebook genre (Nikolajeva & Scott 2013, Clement 2013, Pantaleo 2008, etc.) to demonstrate that the postmodern iconotext is often paradox-ridden and prone to adult deciphering. With that investigative goal, this chapter inspects: (2.1) hitherto dimly explored aspects of the recent picture literacy, eco-literacy and emotional literacy; (2.2) the aesthetics of terror and 'The beauty of the Ugly' in recent iconotexts, from a rich history of canon and representation since Horace, Timanthes and Etruscan models of art; (2.3) the anamorphic potential of the picturebook plate on adult revision. This latter pursuit will lead the inquiry into a lavish tradition of anamorphism -i.e. from Zeuxis, Arcimboldo, Shakespeare or Quevedo- to demonstrate that the new aesthetic philosophy underlying the recent imagetext does not only prompt playfully perceptual gambits, as it often has in tradition, but also cognitively fluctuating ones that adumbrate a new order of vision. Chapter 3 investigates the spatialisation of fiction by transliteration of spatial models of art: namely, the Golden Age model of Dutch architecture painting. Additionally, this chapter expands Tamar Yacobi's theory of succinct ekphrastic modes by elucidating a doubly complex case of ekphrasis, which involves the description of both pictorial and architectural vehicles. Results bring clarification on novel formulas of spatial simulation in narrative. They also evince how consequential the multimodal merging of painting, architecture, and literature may be to construct inner and outward space in fiction and to render psycho-affective plausibility and consistent focalisation to its round character life. Chapter 4 explores the histrionic (and dimly inspected) field of theatrical painting into fiction. The investigation will not be so much based on explicating the mechanisms of dramaturgy, which are ascertained by specialised critique (Monaghan 2008, McMullan 2005, Pavis 1998, Postlewait 1999, etc.), as on underscoring the vii protocol concerning their literary transmutation. Results will manifest the outstanding forcefulness that the pictorially theatrical transfer can thrust into the dramatic life of literature regarding the building of collective scenes through Caravaggio's art (4.2), the translation of character psyche through dramatic gestus in "The Boar Hunt" (4.3), the configuration of narrative pathos and space through mask interventions from Picasso, James Ensor, and Edvard Munch; and the yielding of mental climaxes through the threatrical mode of subjective mind as stage in "The Hanging Man". Chapter 5 expounds hitherto insufficiently trailed modes of musical representation in fiction. It firstly overviews pioneering melopoetic research (Bruhn 2008, Wolf and Bernhart 2007, Scher 2004, Clüver 2002, etc.) to then target the telling and highly paradoxical issue of how wordless, mostly classical, music transposes into the page through the very medium of words. Section 5.1 searches a telling variant to John Nebauer's seminal theory of emplotting (1997), labelled 'The emplotting of memory filters and literary subtexts', which involves the translation of musical classics in fiction (i.e. Beethoven, Leo� Janácek...) with instrumental effects to narrative circumstance and character life. Sections 5.2 and 5.3 examine the transposition of pure music through visual incentives in fiction (instead of the more customary aural procedures that are often involved in the transmedial analysis of music and literature). Concretely, section 5.2 explores a lengthy ekphrastic case of musical description, which instead of relying on predictable sonic analogies between notes and signifiers, draws on (less suspected) visual details to render the musical mimesis. It extrapolates the "source-in-target metonymy INSTRUMENT FOR ACTION" profiles of the linguistically cognitive model (Ruiz de Mendoza 2014, 2011, 2008; Chen 2011; Radden and Kövecses 1999, etc.) into the field of literary poetics and proves its solvency to attain the musical representation in narrative contexts. Section 5.3 diagnoses direct score intervention processes and visually motivational patterns of music-text interface on the page. The fusion of text and musical scores (by Sir Henry Bishop, Mendelssohn, etc.) in two passages from "Ciao" and Selakhi evinces how motivationally enthralling the iconic and smartly complex merging of linguistic and musical signs may be. The verbal message proves to be multimodally enhanced by varied configurations of musical iconicity which, moreover, consolidate stream of consciousness and inner character in fiction. On the whole, the analysis reveals present-day narrative as a vibrant and magnificent lattice, which is amplifying the scope of artistic transfers exponentially -a fact that Seán Virgo's oeuvre illuminates throughout. It also attests the postmodern page as one which subscribes and expands ancient sisterhoods stemming from as late as the Horatian Ut Pictura Poesis and the classical ways to attain enargeia.