Orbis Litterarum 70:4 348–349, 2015
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons A/S.
Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Haun Saussy & Gerald Gillespie (eds.).
Intersections, Interferences, Interdisciplines:
Literature with Other Arts. Nouvelle
po
etique comparatiste / New Comparative
Poetics, vol. 30. Brussels: Peter Lang,
2014, 263 pp.
One of the most interesting features of a
publication based on a selection of
conference papers – in this case, papers
presented at the International
Comparative Literature Association in
Chicago in September 2012 – is the variety
of scholarly backgrounds and institutions
it draws together. Reuniting scholars
coming from North America, Asia, Africa
and Europe, these essays focus on
interarts, intermedial and interdisciplinary
relations from a comparative perspective.
As can be expected, the objects of study,
methodologies and theoretical approaches
vary greatly from paper to paper. As
Haun Saussy’s introduction points out, the
volume is divided into three sections. Part
I asks: ‘Where does the encounter of
different arts occur?’; part II enquires:
‘What is the medium of the encounter?’;
part III questions: ‘How are we to
understand the resulting intermedial
objects?’ (p. 16).
Part I opens with Lois Parkinson
Zamora’s paper ‘Dimensionless cities,
cosmic selves. The visionary spaces of
Jorge Luis Borges and Xul Solar’, which
examines the artists’ shared universalizing
strategies, their common interest in hybrid
creatures and fascination with the
disjunction between part and whole,
between ideal and reality. Lucia Boldrini’s
essay examines Joyce’s ‘Night Lesson’ and
Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe to
reflect upon the language of geometry and
pedagogy and the intricate relationship
between knowledge and children. Monica
Spiridon’s article, ‘The day Europe ended:
Urban apocalypses and the hinge of
darkness’, draws on the work of Bulgakov
and Bely to examine how the ‘urban
theatres’ depicted in their works intersect
and intermingle different artistic discourses
at a time of political and social fracture.
Hein Viljoen’s article examines the
intersection between landscape and poetry
in Afrikaans poetry since 1990.
Part II starts with an essay by Jean
Bessiere, ‘Notes sur quelques jeux de la
litt
erature et de la peinture. Le bonheur
rh
etorique de la d
efiguration – Barthes,
Deleuze, Butor, et quelques autres’, which
shows how the rhetoric of human
disfiguration has been a staple of the work
of the above authors. Hans-Joachim
Backe’s article ‘A literary straitjacket?
Reflection upon comics and literature in
Michael Chabon and Brian K. Vaughan’
reads the work and relationship between
the two authors and their use of the
straightjacket metaphor to (re)affirm
confidence in the inevitable influence
between arts. The second article that
opens this section, ‘Orality onto paper and
into action’, by Margaret R. Higonnet,
interrogates the distinction between adult
and child audiences for moveable books,
in order to foreground the questions that
emerge at the junctures between oral
culture, humour and metatextual play
across text, image and spatial mechanisms.
Mic
eala Symington’s text ‘The artist book/
book-object as “frontiere habitable”’
examines how Michel Butor’s work with
artists inhabits the border between art and
literature. K
enichi Kamigato’s ‘Haruki
Murakami and Western classical music’,
the text that concludes this section, reads
Leos Jan
acek’s Sinfonietta as leitmotiv of
the Japanese author’s novel 1Q84,
concluding that while Murakami handles
Jan
acek’s work more systematically here
than in earlier works, he resists reducing
the Sinfonietta to a mechanical trope.
Book Review
In Part III, Gerald E. P. Gillespie’s
article ‘Speaking of and through the arts
in fiction after Romanticism’ illustrates
how the use of a sophisticated language
comprising references to complex works of
arts by modern novelists functions
hypertextually, allowing their works to
carry cultural vigour and historical
significance. Suzanne Nalbantian’s text,
‘Neuro studies of literature and art.
Toward a responsible critical
methodology’, highlights the value of the
humanities for neuroscience by arguing
that more precise discourses and new
modes of theorizing and collaborating
should be adopted by interdisciplinary
researchers. Anders Pettersson’s essay,
‘The application of literature and of
music’, examines the concept of
‘application’, the acts of ‘focusing,
comparing, and evaluating and their
consequences for the experiencing of the
work of art’ (p. 199) in relation to
literature, music and aesthetics. Marina
Grishakova’s essay, ‘“Unruly fictions”.
Literature, mimesis and media’, uses the
plot of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis as an
example of fictions that are resistant to
visualization, adaptation and cross-medial
transfer, both provoking and suppressing

mimetic readings. Hitoshi Oshima’s text
‘Science, literature and art’ offers an
introduction to modern criticism which
culminates in the presentation of the work
of modern Japanese literary critic
Kobayashi Hideo and his reflections on
literature, art and the sciences. The final
essay of this section and the last essay in
the volume is ‘Nordic friends’ by Steven P.
349
Sondrup and examines artistic and
intermedial intersections in the work of
Sven-Erik B€ ack, Bj€
orn Erling Evensen and
€
Osten Sj€
ostrand by presenting a case study
of their collaborations.
Given the nature of the collection and
variety of topics and methodologies
addressed, it would be helpful for the reader
to be guided by a critical overview of the
main debates emerging from these papers.
Updated definitions of ‘interarts’ and
‘intermediatity’ in light of the new and self-
reflective debates about comparative
literature and the relation between interarts
and intermedial studies (taking into
consideration the prevalence of the former
in many comparative literature depart-
ments) would be worth discussing in more
depth in either the introduction or
afterword of a publication such as this. An
apparently lateral, but not unrelated, issue
worth debating further would be Haun
Saussy’s premise, as stated in the
introduction, that nations are no longer an
‘interesting basis for comparison’ for
comparative literature (p. 12). This idea
should not be taken for granted, at a time
when financial market and political
pressures have themselves been testing the
sovereignty of nations and cultures, with
noticeable reactions from writers and artists
all over the world (and not only from ‘the
global south’). These pressing questions –
and their necessary ‘interferences’ – need to
be reframed today precisely in international
fora such as the ICLA.
Susana Ara ujo,
University of Lisbon