Insistent Images

Published early 2007.

Insistent Images presents a number of new departures dealing with iconicity on the structural and conceptual levels. Novel approaches to aural iconicity investigate the relationship between iconic features in literature and the nineteenth century practice of reading aloud, its use as almost magic incantations in fin-de si?cle poetry or its importance for Tolkien's invented languages. Several papers examine the function of iconicity in visual and - in particular in avant-garde - poetry where iconic features allow a reduction of means, which, paradoxically, generates textual diversification and complexity. 'Liberature', which integrates text, image and physical space, is another novel area of study, as are the investigations into the iconic properties of film and of multimedia performance.

Film is, through its analogical relationship with the life-world, intrinsically iconic, while at the same time being, like photography, indexical. In multimedia performance, on the other hand, iconicity functions intermedially by both integrating and reflecting processes of perception and conceptualization. As yet two new fields of inquiry, they further enhance this truly interdisciplinary volume's explorations of icons as 'insistent images'.