Extended call for papers: The American Imagetext

'To fasten words again to visible things': the American imagetext
A two day conference held by the American Studies department at the
University of East Anglia

Keynote speakers:
WJT Mitchell:
'The Historical Uncanny: Phantoms, Doubles, and Repetition in the War
on Terror'

Miles Orvell:
'The Talking Picture: Speech, Silence, and Ventriloquism in the
Discourse of Photography'

When Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that 'America is a poem in our eyes', he
was partly expressing the transcendental belief that words and images
share a unique and 'radical correspondence' that might enable the poet
'to fasten words again to visible things.' Walt Whitman answered
Emerson's call for such a poet, cementing the special relationship that
still exists in America between the written word and visual image.

The burgeoning discipline of visual studies is perfectly placed to take
the exploration of this relationship in new directions. However, there
is at present a tendency in such studies to neglect the roots of
language in pictures, and to overlook the importance of visual/textual
relations to the expression of American character, culture and identity.
Whilst the growth of visual studies is an exciting development, 'visual
literacy' remains a nebulous and confusing term, and as a field of
academic study, tends not to generate readings outside a tried and
trusted sociological and ideological framework. There is a pressing need
for scholarship in image - text relations to be made more various, more
theoretically adventurous and more culturally and historically
penetrating, and for scholarship to place the study of contiguous images
and texts in a much deeper cultural history of visual/verbal responses
to film and theatre, to landscape and the built environment, to the
visual and plastic arts, to contemporary considerations of mixed media
texts, illustrated texts, illuminated manuscripts, and more.

This conference invites speakers to consider the product and practice of
the interrelations of image and word across disciplines, and in a
specifically American context. We encourage a theoretical approach that
considers, for example, any aspect of science, historiography, theology,
iconology, art history, multicultural and transnational study, film and
media studies, poetry scholarship, cognitive psychology.

Please send a one-page abstract for a 20-minute paper that may address,
but not be restricted to, any of the following:

Naming and captioning
Reading the visual and verbal
The photographic essay or book
Graphic design; the graphic novel
Lettrism, Hypertexts - fiction and poetry, concrete poetry
Environments and spaces of reception and display- eg the gallery, the
museum, the classroom, the church, the home
Ekphrasis
Philosophy
Anthropology and archaeology
Literary use of the physical or imagined image
The use of verbal signs in the visual arts
Verbal and visual ontology
Illustrated texts - fiction or non-fiction
Illuminated manuscripts
Artists' notebooks / scrapbooks
Performance and installation art
Iconography and iconology involving word and image
Image and text in digital media
Image and text in the visual arts, including theatre, film, photography
and television
The manifesto as imagetext
Newspapers and broadsides
Street art and graffiti

Please send abstracts to Dr Catherine Gander and Dr Sarah Garland at
americanimagetextgmail.com by March 31st 2011.

Panel suggestions are also welcome. Conference participants may be
encouraged to expand and revise their papers for submission to an edited
collection of essays.