The Dual Muse: The Writer as Artist, the Artist as Writer. Papers from the International Writers Center Symposium, 7 9 Nov. 1997.

CUOCO, Lorin (ed.)

ISBN 10: 9027221693 / ISBN 13: 9789027221698

Published by John Benjamins, 1999

About this Item

144 pages. 9.45x8.27x0.39 inches. In Stock.

Seller Inventory # __9027221693

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Dual Muse: The Writer as Artist, the Artist as Writer. Papers from the International Writers Center Symposium, 7 9 Nov. 1997.
• Publisher: John Benjamins
• Publication Date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9027221693
• ISBN 13: 9789027221698
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Brand New
• Weight: 0.63 kilograms

About this title

Synopsis

For centuries an artist adept in one medium has found solace, encouragement, and inspiration in another, even to the point of merging them. Michelangelo put down his chisel to pick up his pen; Blake pictorialized his poetry; Max Ernst collaged narratives; Gertrude Stein adopted a cubist style. This bicameral interplay of the verbal and pictorial has never been more pronounced than in our own time. The Dual Muse explores a range of creative interrelationships between the visual arts and literary media in works by selected modern and contemporary artists and authors.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Once upon a time, it was customary for educated persons to include both literature and painting in their studies, and to consider writing and drawing to be desirable skills. Some familiarity with a musical instrument was also expected. People communicated by letter, entertained at home with amateur recitals, and when traveling abroad recorded memorable moments in their diaries, or rendered notable sights through pencil, ink, and watercolor sketches. Music, painting, and poetry were graces expected of men and women of refined taste everywhere. The same hand might employ a pen or pencil to figure accounts, confess love, or depict a scene, and in most cases the hand's skills would have been learned in school as a matter of course. The hand was the carrier of music to the ear; it brought a thought out from the mind; it formed a figure for the eye. The pen and brush resembled one another, paper and canvas were as twins, and each were worked upon or directed by educated fingers no less than the flute, the recorder, or the piano were.

-from William Gass's "La maison d'en face or that Other Art"