Bowen Wang

Selected Publications

1. 

   Vital Modernism: E. E. Cummings’s Still Life, the Quotidian, and Visceral Poetics

   Bowen Wang

   Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 48, no. 2, 2025, pp. 112-35.

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   Among his intermedial enterprises, E. E. Cummings engaged with the genre of still life. Instead of displaying inanimate matters in a traditional manner, the poet-painter transfigured the physically motionless façade of everyday objects into a dynamic and visceral experience of (self-)vitalizing. His aesthetic representation of the quotidian conflates the material and the immaterial as a modernist craft of art-making that recreates a vibrating entanglement of the thingy form, its surroundings, and one’s attentive and meditative continuum. Through his verbal-visual experiments, Cummings overrides the distinction between the static and the motile, interiority and exteriority, and art and life, by foregrounding the intrinsic spirit of still life as an evolving desire to be encoded and reconfigured in varying senses and structures. His visceral poetics of reinstating liveness/liveliness from stillness thus provides the reader-viewers with an active way of dialoguing with the corporeal, affective, and imaginary realities that surround them.

2. 

   On and Off the Canvas: William Carlos Williams’s Ekphrasis and Wallace Stevens’s Abstraction as Modernism’s Transmedial Artifice

   Bowen Wang

   Papers on Language and Literature, vol. 59, no. 4, 2025, pp. 256-94.

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   This article examines how the transmedial synergy between verbal and visual forms reshaped aesthetic perception and cultural recognition in the early twentieth century, focusing on the non-literary elements in modernist poetries of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. Both poets, associated with avant-garde movements, developed a self-awareness of the symbiotic relation between poetry and painting in their transmedial creations. For instance, Williams’s ekphrastic references to classical artworks and his collaboration with contemporaneous painters, along with Stevens’s philosophical reflections on a unified theory of art grounded in abstraction. By proposing the concept of modernist aesthetics of transmediality, this study critically investigates how their interartistic approaches challenge the longstanding debate between poesis and pictura at the peak of the Lessingian dichotomy. Furthermore, the article explores how verbal designs and compositions, enshrouded within visual culture and mass media, offer radical artifice for new strain of expression, mediation, and re-presentation that refract the medial complexities of modernity.

3. 

   "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. 153-85.

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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.

4. 

   Silence and Empowering: The Gendered Narrative of Modernism in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

   Bowen Wang

   Modernism Revisited: Texts and Contexts, edited by Amitayu Chakraborty, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2026, pp. 97-106.

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   In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the portrayal of women is not central to the fictional narrative; rather, their characteristic presence is eclipsed by male protagonists with their literary descriptions scant in comparison. Some have criticised Conrad for confining female characters to (con)textual sexism or patriarchism – marginalising their individual autonomy and silencing their expressive voices. Yet, reconsidering Conrad within the critical framework of modernist narration, this chapter aims to dispel the negative, passive depictions of his woman figures perpetuated by stereotypical interpretations in the past. By scrutinising the symbolic dynamics of feminine discourses and their gender politics in the novella, it will elucidate the emancipatory struggles of modern womanhood to assert both their literal and societal agency, which implicitly readdresses the “formidable silence” that permeates the storytelling, whether in retrospective narratives and actual realities.

5. 

   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.