This volume advances the study of how the high arts and literature are reciprocally illuminating and interactive. Seventeen scholars from North America, Asia, Africa, and Europe demonstrate the dynamics of cross-referentiality and mixtures involving also newer and popular arts and media: photography, film, video, comics, dance, opera, computer imaging, and more. They consider an expanded universe of discourses embracing contemporary science as well as traditional subject matters. Discussions of theoretical and methodological approaches keep company here with intensively focused case studies of works in which discourses and media establish new relationships. Together, the chapters constitute a dazzling introduction to the diverse realm of imaginative products that the human mind can conjure in pondering the «when», «where», and «how» of existence.

Table of Contents:
Contents: Haun Saussy: Introduction. On the Corner – Lois Parkinson Zamora: Dimensionless Cities, Cosmic Selves. The Visionary Spaces of Jorge Luis Borges and Xul Solar – Lucia Boldrini: Among Schoolchildren. Joyce’s «Night Lesson» and Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe – Monica Spiridon: The Day Europe Ended. Urban Apocalypses in the Hinge of Darkness – Dorothy Figueira: Translating the Bhagavad Gītā? From the German Lecture Hall to the Trenches of WW I/From Neo-Nazi Propaganda to the Opera Stage – Hein Viljoen: Some Intersections between Landscape and Poetry in Afrikaans Poetry since 1990 – Jean Bessière : Notes sur quelques jeux de la littérature et de la peinture. Le Bonheur rhétorique de la défiguration - Barthes, Deleuze, Butor, et quelques autres – Hans-Joachim Backe: A Literary Straitjacket? Reflections upon Comics and Literature in Michael Chabon and Brian K. Vaughan – Margaret R. Higonnet: Orality Onto Paper and Into Action – Micéala Symington: The Artist’s Book/Book-object as «Frontière habitable». Literature, Art and Creative Continuity in Michel Butor’s Works – Kenichi Kamigaito: Haruki Murakami and Western Classical Music. Janáček’s Sinfonietta as Leitmotiv of the Novel, 1Q84 – Gerald E.P. Gillespie: Speaking of and through the Arts in Fiction after Romanticism – Suzanne Nalbantian: Neuro Studies of Literature and Art. Toward a Responsible Critical Methodology – Anders Pettersson: The Application of Literature and of Music – Marina Grishakova: «Unruly Fictions». Literature, Mimesis and Media – Hitoshi Ōshima: Science, Literature and Art. An Introduction to Modern Criticism through Kobayashi Hideo – Steven P. Sondrup: Nordic Friends.