14th SAAS Conference
“The Image and the Word: Interactions between American Literature, Media, Visual Arts and Film”
University of Salamanca (Spain)
10-12 April, 2019
Word and image play an important role in perception. Under the landslide of innovation in the domain of communication and representation in the last half-century, the visual turn of culture enhanced by the postmodern digital turn has fundamentally changed traditional means of understanding culture and the expression of literature, image, film, and photography. Various philosophers and theoreticians, such as James Heffernan, Wendy Steiner, Barbara Stafford, W.J.T. Mitchell, have analyzed the “pictorial turn” of our present, claiming that the long dominance of the written book is giving way to the visual image —cinema, video, photography, and other forms of pictorial and digital representation.