Reconfigurations: 20th- and 21st-Century Literature and the Arts

Reconfigurations

20th- and 21st-Century Literature and the Arts

NTU Singapore ● 4 - 5 October 2025

Call for Papers

Reconfigurations 2025 seeks to explore the innovative and dynamic achievements of contemporary arts and to extend the critical discourses on their significance in our time. The central theme of the Conference is the intermedial, that is, the interconnectedness and interaction of different art forms across aesthetic and cultural boundaries, and the invigorating and rich transformations resulting from these crisscrossings.

It is generally recognized that, in the early to mid-twentieth century, authors such as W.B. Yeats, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Joyce Cary, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett, Wallace Stevens, and Vladimir Nabokov – among others -- all directly engaged with the visual arts and aesthetics as both subject and narrative strategy while simultaneously offering overt commentary on the relationship between word and image. In the decades following, as W. J. T. Mitchell has elaborated in his diagnoses of a “pictorial turn” in the humanities (Mitchell, 1994), the critical conversation in these key areas has been expanded and developed in multiple and complex ways by present-day writers, such that, alongside the interworkings of written and visual texts, diverse and different disciplines of art have been, and are caught up, in the excitement of creatively interacting with each other. A few mentions which must suffice here include the intermediality of photography and the literary text in the writings of W. G. Sebald and Teju Cole; of calligraphy, video technology, and cinema in Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book; of the art of Japanese gardens and the history of the Japanese occupation of Malaya in Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists; of poetry, science, Zen in Jane Hirshfield’s works; and of music and painting in Aubrey Williams’s Shostakovich (1961-1981) – all the fifteen symphonies –  a series of visual correlations attaining to a condition of “hearing light, tasting sound” as Errol Lloyd aptly dubs it (Lloyd, 2020).