Literature and the Other Arts
Comparative literature has always reached beyond the verbal, asking how literature relates to painting, music, and film. The study of literature and the other arts — interart and intermedial studies — explores both the kinship and the irreducible differences among the media.
Definition
The branch of comparative literature concerned with the relations between literature and the other arts — visual art, music, film — including the theory of interart comparison, ekphrasis, adaptation, and intermediality.
Scope
Covers the comparative study of literature in relation to the other arts: the classical doctrine of the sister arts and Lessing's challenge to it, the verbal-visual relation and ekphrasis, literature and music, and contemporary theories of adaptation and intermediality. It treats relations across media rather than within a single art.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- On what basis can literature be compared with the non-verbal arts?
- What are the specific capacities and limits of verbal versus visual or musical media?
- How does literature represent or evoke the other arts, as in ekphrasis?
- How do works move between media through adaptation and intermedial reference?
Key theories
- Limits of the comparison of the arts
- Wellek and Warren cautioned that the analogy between literature and the other arts is often loose and metaphorical, and called for rigor in interart comparison.
- The limits of poetry and painting
- Lessing argued in Laocoön that poetry is an art of time suited to action and painting an art of space suited to bodies, founding the systematic comparison of verbal and visual media.
- Picture theory and the imagetext
- Mitchell analyzed the entanglement of word and image, arguing against any simple separation and theorizing the 'imagetext' as a composite verbal-visual form.
- Intermediality
- Rajewsky distinguished kinds of intermediality — medial transposition, media combination, and intermedial reference — to specify how literature relates to and invokes other media.
History
The doctrine of ut pictura poesis — that poetry is like painting — descends from Horace and Renaissance theory; Lessing's 1766 Laocoön sharply distinguished the temporal and spatial arts. Twentieth-century comparative literature theorized interart comparison cautiously (Wellek and Warren, 1949), while the visual-culture and intermediality turns, including Mitchell's 1994 Picture Theory and Rajewsky's 2005 taxonomy, renewed the field across media.
Debates
- Kinship versus specificity of the media
- Whether literature and the other arts share enough common ground for systematic comparison or whether each medium's specific capacities, as Lessing argued, set firm limits to the analogy.
Key figures
- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
- René Wellek
- W. J. T. Mitchell
- Irina Rajewsky
Related topics
Seminal works
- lessing1984
- wellekwarren1949
- mitchell1994
- rajewsky2005
Frequently asked questions
- What is ut pictura poesis?
- A Latin phrase from Horace meaning 'as is painting, so is poetry'. It became the slogan of the Renaissance doctrine of the sister arts, asserting a close kinship between poetry and painting that Lessing later challenged by stressing each medium's distinct nature.