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Author ORCID Identifier
N/A
AccessType
Open Access Dissertation
Document Type
dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Program
Comparative Literature
Year Degree Awarded
2018
Month Degree Awarded
September
First Advisor
Jim Hicks
Second Advisor
Jessica Barr
Third Advisor
Karen Cardozo
Fourth Advisor
Mazen Naous
Subject Categories
Comparative Literature
Abstract
This dissertation offers a comparative study of the poetic, verbal, visual and material dimensions of textuality. It asks the following questions: what does texture look like in our literary context? What does an attention to layers and fragility convey about or add to our reading experience? And how can they relate to the experience of loss? I argue that an engagement with textures may help account for a layered multidimensionality and that structural imageries—whether in relation to organic matter or textile or overlay—allow for the intersection of materiality and conceptuality in intricate patterns. I offer a poetic reading of intermedial visual and textual contemporary artworks that carry a problematic relationship to print culture: books as works of art in the case of bookarts by American artist Jody Alexander, words and images in the case of picturebooks by French author/illustrator Frédéric Clément, and a combination of verse and prose in ekphrastic poetry in the case of Lebanese poet Bassam Hajjar. In these case studies a multisensory attention to matters, textiles, and surfaces accentuates the fragility of expression through an emotional investment in materialities. In a textured reading that privileges the decorative and the ornamental, I show how the layering of details, voices, and patterns of repetition creates a heightened reception and a deep emotional state, all the while conveying a sense of loss. I conclude that to read texture is to prepare oneself for an experience of the ineffable, which renders its own limitations in its unique form of aesthetics, shrouding the inescapable loss in communication in an excess of material expression, enfolding the pain or the knowledge of impossibility or hesitancy into textured imagery for a textural experience.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/12582767
Recommended Citation
Matta, Lara, "The Texture of Reading / Reading Textures: Poetic, Visual, Material, and Inter-medial Dimensions of Textuality in Arabic Poetry, French Picturebooks, and North American Bookarts" (2018). Doctoral Dissertations. 1456.
https://doi.org/10.7275/12582767
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/1456