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Contemporary works of electronic literature that focus on the use of moving text are aesthetically related to the text movies that arose in the experimental film community, particularly in the 1960s, and both share much in common with concrete and visual poetry. Though criticism has traditionally placed a barrier between works of electronic literature and cinematic text movies on the basis of their perceived medium (cinema characterised by emulsion and electronic literature characterised by computer code), textual screen works originating from both media utilise similar techniques in the presentation and manipulation of text. Interactivity is potentially a differentiator between electronic literature and cinema, but this distinction is negated by the fact that not all works of electronic literature are interactive (that is, they do not require an interactor in order to function). The increasing digitisation and, to a lesser extent, interactivity of cinema also argues against placing a gap between electronic literature and cinematic works that utilise the textual screen. Text movies, visual poetry, and other digital works featuring moving text can be seen as belonging to the same family; they are united by the aesthetic experience of perceiving them, which derives from a dynamic tension between the act of reading and the act of watching. Taken together, they form a continuum of countertextual practice that involves the destabilisation of reading and the displacement of literary significance away from traditional means of sense-making and towards the use of text-as-objects that do not always achieve the status of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses several visual poems that both translate and adapt Bashō's popular frog haiku; such works are theorized here as multimodal transaptations. Bashō's poem blends form and meaning, action and stasis, sound and silence. Traditional translations struggle to incorporate some of these features because of the limitations of the target language. Visual poetry, by drawing on the affordances of print - which includes verbal, visual, and diagrammatic cues - is better equipped to reflect and extend the style and content of Bashō's haiku into the more limited forms of English textuality, while also engaging in the playfulness of the haiku and calligraphic traditions. Produced through a hybrid, multimodal approach, these visual transaptations present the reader with a range of cues that are neither strictly mimetic nor adaptive, and which challenge assumptions about stylistic choices, translation, authorship, and poetic meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the use of visual-verbal punning structures in Guillaume Apollinaire's calligrammes, or visual poems. It considers how Apollinaire's mobilization of these punning structures may have emerged out of an interest in 'l'art des fous' (art and creative writing by the mentally ill, in which punning was a recurring feature), in psychiatric discourses which insisted on a link between punning and irrationality, and in the work of Jean-Pierre Brisset, whose nonsensical, pun-based theories of evolution made him a living embodiment of that link. It argues that for Apollinaire, the calligramme was an attempt to represent the structures of thought - unfettered, irrational thought - which could not be captured by linear discourse. The article situates this aspect of the calligrammes within the broader context of Apollinaire's primitivism, as expressed in his art criticism, before considering the continuity between Apollinaire's engagement with 'l'art des fous' and that of Breton, exploring the ethical implications of an aestheticizing approach to the 'mad' or 'primitive' work of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary scholars have recently become increasingly interested in the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms involved in reading, and have incorporated scientific research in this area into their critical approaches to texts. This article argues that such an approach is particularly appropriate when authors explicitly engage with the way in which their texts are visually taken in and processed. This is the case with Guillaume Apollinaire, whose calligrammes are informed by a theory of visual-verbal simultaneity stipulating that the reader should be simultaneously aware of both textual and pictorial aspects of the poem. Experimental research in the psychology of reading and picture perception is used to assess this theory of simultaneity, and specifically to challenge Michel Foucault's claim that reading and viewing are mutually exclusive processes. The article concludes by considering further applications of psychological research to word and image studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]