Photography as Critical Idiom and Intermedial Criticism

Abstract Although numerous studies have been devoted to the relations between painting and literature, surprisingly few have focused on the photography/text rela-tionship. Photography-in-text is a hybrid product that gives rise to a hybrid textual genre and so renews the iconotext. The specific characteristics of photography have left their mark upon fiction: they have generated new ways of seeing and, conse-quently, of reading. This essay explores how photography has renewed fiction and continues to do so through its specific properties. In addition, its particular posi-tion within word and image studies is examined. As a result, one can envisage a poetics of the photographic visual and, conversely, lay the foundations for a critical idiom: a metatextual practice and intermedial criticism resting on the image as a means whereby to study fiction through the lens of what may be called the “pictorial third.” Nineteen years ago, in a double issue of Poetics Today dedicated to art and literature, A. Kibédi Varga (1989: 32) argued that, despite the increasing number of studies on word and image relations, “few efforts have been made as yet to make explicit the general problems underlying this kind of research. I see at least two central problems, one methodological, and one taxonomic. ” As he predicted, the proliferation of conferences and publica-tions (Holly and Moxey 2002, Mitchell 2005, Vouilloux 2005) testify that we are now in the era of “the visual. ” Thus it is necessary to renew the critical approach to the study of art and literature so that it may be bette