Iconographies
Iconographies
This chapter analyzes and complicates the symbolic link between the sinograph and visuality, most (in)famously embodied in the pictographic bias that equates Chinese writing and imagistic mimesis. It first scrutinizes early film and media theories that use ideographic and hieroglyphic writing to envision the new medium of moving pictures, giving rise to a whole tense critical tradition that attempts to keep image and text apart, while incessantly defining one through the other at the same time. It then explores examples of concrete poetry from Brazil, France, and Taiwan to show that the link between writing and visuality is not a simple equation, but rather a complex field in which different ideas about the visual and the graphic as well as different languages, media, and cultures interact.
Keywords: Chinese script, Chinese writing, visuality imagistic mimesis, poetry, visuality
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