Bowen Wang

Selected Publications

1. MC

   "A draughtsman of words": The Modernist Crafting of Prosodic Intermediality in E. E. Cummings’ Fauvist and Cubist Palettes

   Bowen Wang

   Modernist Cultures, vol. 19, no. 2-3, 2024, pp. 153-185.

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   In the context of intermedial modernism, this article delves into the Fauvist and Cubist influences of Continental avant-gardes and their painterly crafts on E. E. Cummings’ early poems from the 1920s. During this ‘Francophile’ period in Paris encountering Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, Cummings has cultivated a distinct modernist vision that transcends the national, cultural and medium-specific boundaries. His artistic experimentation entails the bold use of wild colours, abstract lines, analytic forms and typographical language. The core of this composite artistry resides in the prosodic intermediality as eccentric craftsmanship exhibited in his ‘poempictures.’ The poet-painter dedicated himself to a creative transfiguration of linguistic structures and graphic patterns, melding them into alternative modes of expression that reshape our perceptions, affections and multisensual experiences. In doing so, Cummings’ intermedial prosody envisions an idiosyncratically avant-garde palette to celebrate the vitality, dynamism and self-transcendence intrinsic to the pluralistic ethos of modernist aesthetics.

2. JLS

   Intermedialising Modernities: The Polyphonism of Modernist Ut pictura poesis

   Bowen Wang

   Journal of Literary Studies, vol. 40, 2024, pp. 1-20.

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   The early twentieth century ushered in an unprecedented era of intermedial convergence, where different art forms such as poesis and pictura began to confabulate with each other rather than competing in historically paragonal debates. A hallmark of modernist aesthetics is the shift towards the non-verbal mediums, with poets breaking away from outdated subjects and linguistic structures, and instead experimenting with the visual, material, and spatial incorporation from non-literary domains. Hence, this article proposes an alternative framework for understanding and reconceptualising modernism through intermediality. It develops the polyphonically dialogic poetics—based on four types of dialogues: referential, associative, programmatic, and self-reflexive—emphasising the interaction and re-unification between textuality and visuality. Concluding with this typology of modernist collaborations, the study illuminates the mutual agency of creators of the time and the sociocultural implications of their artefacts. By adopting a revisionary focus on intermediality as an act of dialogising, it critically reinterprets the mediation within modernist ut pictura poesis as fluid, multifarious, and synergetic.

3. PM

   Reformulating the Theory of Literary Intermediality: A Genealogy from Ut Pictura Poesis to Poststructuralist In-Betweenness

   Bowen Wang

   The Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality, edited by Jørgen Bruhn et al., Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, pp. 339-64.

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   The Horatian dogma of ut pictura poesis positions itself at the interdisciplinary confluence not only of poetry and painting, but also, to a large extent, of rhetoric and aesthetics, epistemology and philosophy, cognition and other related social sciences. The theoretical discussion on the relationship of different media first emerged as a structural parallel that stressed kinship and harmony in Aristotelian poetics, and was then transformed into paragonal debates that emphasized difference and exceptionality during the Renaissance. Later, it arrived at an extreme delimitation of temporal and spatial arts, which deepened the historically empirical concern regarding philosophical and aesthetic fundamentals in the implications of binary opposition. Therefore, to sidestep the formal comparativity or time/space dichotomy as delineated from a genealogical approach, the notion of intermediality should be reformulated as a conceptual and ideological extension of ut pictura poesis. Its intermedial core shall be better understood on a theoretical basis of in-betweenness underpinned by a poststructuralist tendency. These both provide alternatives to the universality, radicalism, grand narrative, and fixed identity championed in the traditional literary and other art forms. Coming from the position of the in-between, intermediality has offered a series of new perspectives that transcend a limited point of view, cross the boundaries of stereotyped sections, decenter long-established authorities, link disconnected fragments, and search for revolutionary potentials. At the ultimate end, it creates a dynamic, fluid, and highly interactive communication that was scarce in the preexisting literary and art historiography.

4. MSIA

   "Beyond Ideogrammic Method": E. E. Cummings’ ’Poempictures,’ Eastern Aesthetics, and Pacific-Rim Modernism

   Bowen Wang

   “Modernism between Past and Future”: The 3rd International Conference of the Modernist Studies in Asia Network, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China, May-June 2024.