Journal Articles

2024

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 A hallmark of modernist aesthetics is the shift towards the non-verbal mediums, with poets breaking away from outdated subjects and linguistic structures, and instead experimenting with the visual, material, and spatial incorporation from non-literary domains.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. ANQ

   “In the austere theatre of the Infinite”: Constructivist Abstraction as the Aesthetic Archetype in Mina Loy’s Ekphrases

   Bowen Wang

   ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, vol. 37, no. 1, 2024, pp. 70-77.

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2023

1. OL

   Poet as Poem: The Intermedial Staging of A. E. Housman in Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love

   Huayu Yang, and Bowen Wang

   Orbis Litterarum, online print, 2023, pp. 1-18.

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   Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love (1997) offers the audience a dream-like voyage through the post-mortem reminiscences of the central character, A. E. Housman. The attempt to resurrect Housman, as the historical figure in real life, is suspended by the intertextual incorporation of Housman’s poems, the both fictive and enigmatically private voice of which opens up the illusory closure of biographically accurate dramatic characterisation. By fluidising and activating the subversive emotions contained in the formal patterns of the poetic text, the intermedial stage with the corporeality of its theatrical embodiment becomes a spatialised metaphor for the poetry as an open space that is inviting meaning to be projected onto it. The poetic and the theatrical, thus deterritorialised by their intermedial exchanges, interlace a dreamscape in which the nomadic search for the uncorrupted, unappropriated poet/poem continuum provides a transcendental empiricist reading of the ‘truth’ about Housman.

2022

1. Explicator

   Words as Readymade: Mina Loy’s Verbal Portraiture of “Gertrude Stein” and “Joyce’s Ulysses”

   Bowen Wang

   The Explicator, vol. 80, no. 1-2, 2022, pp. 53-59.

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   Between 1919 and 1930, Mina Loy created a series of pictorial and poetic portraits of her artistic contemporaries: from pen-ink sketches such as Constantin Brancusi, Carl Van Vechten, Jules Pascin, Marianne Moore, to linguistically innovative verses like “‘Joyce’s Ulysses,” “Gertrude Stein,” “Nancy Cunard,” and a note “William Carlos Williams.” In interacting with avant-gardists of her time, Loy explored new patterns of expression as an alternative to literary and cultural conventions. This paper will thus investigate the use of readymade words in two of Loy’s artist-portrait poems depicting Gertrude Stein and James Joyce. Her verbal portraits do not merely offer the reader a poetic profile of modernist artists and their formal experimentation. It will be demonstrated at the end of this paper that, by treating the word as readymade, Loy and her portrayed writers are able to articulate a different form of language that is more fluid, plastic, and performative.

2. PJES

   The Materialisation of “torrential languages” within the Avant-Garde: Mina Loy, James Joyce, and Aesthetic Modernism

   Bowen Wang

   Prague Journal of English Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 2022, pp. 1-14.

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   Modernist literature was obsessed with a metaphysical problem regarding the word. A series of formal and material experiments started to address the word’s self-referentiality and aesthetic autonomy, against the backdrop of a new sociocultural milieu in the early twentieth century. To discover how this materialisation of language explored the interplay of literary and artistic modernism, this paper will critically scrutinise Mina Loy’s and James Joyce’s radical reforms of writing and try to answer the following questions: how did Loy’s multifarious artisthood and poem-writing exchange, interact with, and reinforce each other? As both were closely associated with avant-garde art movements between Europe and America, how did Joyce influence Loy’s refashioning of “torrential languages” (LoLB 88) as a creative model of linguistic experimentation? How did their visual aesthetics and experimental poetics help to declare the independence of language and the shape of aesthetic modernism in a new historical epoch?

3. JCLA

   Metafiction toward a Literary Hyperreality: Postmodernist Textual Strategies in Martin Amis’s Money

   Bowen Wang

   (Con)textual Strategies: Understanding and Interpretation, special issue of Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, vol. 45, no. 4, 2022, pp. 76-84.

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   Martin Amis’s Money has been regarded as an essential representation of socio-cultural postmodernism, especially in the latter part of the twentieth century. As a metafictional novel, it deploys one of the critical postmodernist textual strategies to establish the sense of literary hyperreality. This complex site of narration challenges the traditional ways of reception and interpretation that have dominated the realistic and even the previously modernist narrative over the past decades. To investigate the self-conscious, self-reflexive characteristics in Amis’s novel, this article will focus on authorial intrusion, doubling, metafictional commentary/criticism, and text-reader interaction. By doing so, it will then critically analyze the establishment of – in Jean Baudrillard’s notion – textual hyperreality, through which structuralist meaning and interpretation have been disrupted and reconstructed in a postmodernist epistemology to realize a new and negotiating relationship between the text, the reader, and the living world.

2021

1. JLAS

   Word-Image Intertwining: William Blake’s Illuminated Poetry and the Aesthetics of Compositeness

   Bowen Wang

   Journal of Literature and Art Studies, vol. 11, no. 6, 2021, pp. 375-387.

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   From ut pictura poesis to intermediality, the close, interactive, and complicated relationship between poetry and painting has been an inevitable subject under discussion throughout the historiography of literature and fine art. Different approaches and interpretations to/on their sisterhood could come to a broad spectrum of interartistic ideas and practices. William Blake, an English Romantic poet, painter, and printmaker, links word and image by his invention of relief etching, or more understandably, the illuminated painting which juxtaposes his verse with in-text illustrations simultaneously on the same page. His technical strategy has already implied a dynamic and dialectical interrelation between word and image, like the treatment of earlier medieval manuscripts, yet in a more innovative rather than decorative manner. This article, therefore, through a comparative analysis of both Blake’s verbal and visual representations, will first attempt to clarify two distinct modes of combining poetic language with visualisation vis-à-vis form and content, and then critically investigate how this word-image interaction can be used to reflect the poet’s Romantic thought about sociocultural changes and provide new possibilities of reading, interpretation, and aesthetic complexity in that specific epoch.

2. JCLA

   Demystification of the “Innocent Eye”: Nelson Goodman, Ernst H. Gombrich, and the Limitation of Conventionalism

   Bowen Wang

   Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, vol. 44, no. 1, 2021, pp. 81-88.

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   Both literary and artistic historiography has been devoted to exploring the basic relationship between the real world and the work of art, from the mimetic theories of Plato and Aristotle to the contemporary theorists, i.e. Nelson Goodman and Ernst H. Gombrich. Their attempts to probe into the nature of pictorial representation mainly respond to two questions: What is the relationship between representation and that it is to represent (between picture and reality)? What is the mechanism of, or in an ontological sense, what is representation? Guided by these two questions, my article will critically investigate the models of Goodman’s and Gombrich’s representation theory on account of convention rather than resemblance, expression, or imitation.

Special Issues

2024

1. JCLA

   Introduction: Towards an Alternative Poetics of Intermediality

   Bowen Wang, and Amelia McConville

   Intermedial Poetries: Alternative Methods and Practices, special issue of Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, vol. 47, no. 2, 2024, pp. 1-7.

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Book Chapters

2023

1. 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.

2021

1. LCIR

   “Save this damn’d profession of writing”: Ezra Pound’s Images, Vortex, and Poetics of Intermediality

   Bowen Wang

   Music, Poetry and Language: Sound, Sight and Speech in Comparative and Creative Connection, edited by Konrad Gunesch, London: Interdisciplinary Discourses, 2021, pp. 249-262.

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   Ezra Pound, a modernist experimentalist, executed his motto “make it new” by enriching poetry with inspiration from modern paintings. Bridging the realms of art history and literature, a practice of intermediality, he fulfilled his innovative promises and managed to establish a unique voice in early twentieth-century Parnassus. To some extent, he could be entitled as the central figure of the avant-gardist art movements, from London, Paris, to Rome, who worked as – in Wyndham Lewis’ word – a vortex in the whirlpool of Post-Impressionism, Imagism, Futurism, Cubism, and Vorticism, to consistently exercise and perfect his notion of primary pigment. The newly-emerging modernism, following the post-romantic fusion of different types of art, is concerned with an alternative frame, transcending the generic and formal boundaries assigned by the neoclassical aesthetic theory in the previous century to advance beyond the limitations of each medium. As an alternative to the constructivist aesthetics, Pound’s experimental poetics resorts to a complex, balanced network of the featured thematic or formal dimensions of poetry and visual art. The limitation of language, the crisis of representation, and the interdisciplinarity of aestheticism that influenced Pound and his poetics of beauty in the early years, thus render him conscious of the need of searching for a new vocabulary by translating the verbal into the visual. In this sense, Pound’s establishment of Imagism and then involvement in Vorticism in the post-impressionist context has shown his continuous efforts to separate from realist, naturalist conventions and create new forms and radical voices of the modernist aesthetics.

Other Articles

2022

1. TMR

   Mina Loy, Logopoeia, and The Alphabet that Builds Itself

   Bowen Wang

   The Modernist Review, issue 39, 4 April 2022.

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2020

1. USSO

   Decomposing and Reconstructing the Marginal: Walker Evans’ Portrait Photography in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

   Bowen Wang

   U.S. Studies Online: Forum for New Writing, 5 October 2020.

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