The Contemporary Intermedial Turn in Literary-Creative Practice
Description
How does writing become reshaped when it converses with other media? What kinds of worlds can emerge at the porous interstices of words, images, and immersive space?
This seminar invites scholars, artists, and creative practitioners to explore the intermedial turn in literary and creative writing—especially poetry, memoir, fiction, and nonfiction—as these genres enter into dynamic dialogue with photography, film, virtual reality, and other visual or spatial media.
Grounded in W. J. T. Mitchell’s seminal concept of the “pictorial turn” in the humanities (1994), we examine how contemporary writers and artists engage in complex, creative interplay between the written and the visual. Examples include, but are not limited to, the intermedial blending of photography and prose in W. G. Sebald, Teju Cole, and Annie Ernaux, who explore memory and history through visual-textual interplay. In dialogue with these, we highlight notable Asian intermedial works—such as Don Mee Choi’s Mirror Nation, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Root Ruptures and Ghost Of, and Lawrence Ypil’s The Experiment of the Tropics—as well as the immersive VR poetry projects of literary-artist-scholars like Collier Nogues. We also warmly welcome theoretical explorations and case studies from other regions and traditions that contribute to this global conversation.
To deepen this exploration, we draw on Tim Ingold’s concept of “correspondence,” which frames intermediality not as mere juxtaposition but as an ongoing, responsive dialogue. For Ingold, correspondence is an attentional, relational movement where different media—text, image, sound, and space—actively engage and transform one another. This relational model encourages us to see literary and creative practices as hybrid, processual forms of world-making that invite embodied, situated, and ethical encounters. Although widely applied in art and design, this concept remains underexplored in literary and creative practice, making it a rich framework for this seminar’s investigation into intermediality.
We welcome proposals that engage with:
Theoretical frameworks such as intermediality and creative-critical practice;
Hybrid literary forms combining text with images, immersive technologies, or spatial media;
Situated knowledge practices addressing ecological, archival, historical, or decolonial themes;
Explorations of how writing-with-other-media shapes imaginative worlds and ethical responses to place, history, and precarity.
This seminar aims to foster a vibrant dialogue between established Western intermedial practices and emerging approaches elsewhere. Together, we explore how intermedial literary and artistic works collaboratively 1) reframe memory, history, and embodiment; 2) push the boundaries of literary analysis by centering experimental intermedial approaches; and 3) transform the way media, voice, and embodied presence coalesce to forge, fracture, and feel worlds anew.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Mayumo Inoue works at the intersection of aesthetic theories and deimpeial politics. Mayumo’s publications include the co-edited collection Beyond Imperial Aesthetics: Theories of Art and Politics in East Asia (Hong Kong University Press), the chapter on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's fugitive poetics in A Blackwell Companion to American Poetry, and the article on deimperial poetics of "the object" across the transpacific in Discourse. He is a founding member of an Okinawa-based art journal las barcas.
Speaker Bio
Christian Bischoff is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM) at Princeton University. His dissertation explores how contemporary Anglophone poets work across genres to challenge "history" and craft a "language of resistance" that can open into liberatory political work in the present. He received an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow, and an AB from Princeton University.
Speaker Bio
Pareys Liu Yiyi is a PhD candidate in English Literary Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is studying contemporary Asian diasporic poetry, interdisciplinary creative practices, and women’s writing in the Global South. Her writing has appeared in PEN Voices: English (2017), Jintian Journal (2020), Enclave Literary Journal (2022), Cha: An Asian Literary Journal (2023).
Speaker Bio
Lily Beckett is currently a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Bristol, having received her MA in Comparative Literature from King's College London and her BA in Classics and English from Oxford University. Her research focuses on intermedial poetries of resistance since the 1970s, particularly works by Cecilia Vicuña, Etel Adnan, Kamau Brathwaite, Bhanu Kapil and Linton Kwesi-Johnson. Her published articles can be found in Women’s Studies and Interfaces.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Michael Reyes Salas is a comparatist who is writing about prison ruination and photo-texts. He has published in the CENTRO Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Dalhousie French Studies, and Asymptote. He studied Comparative Literature at UT Austin and was a Chester Dale Fellow in the Department of Photography at the Met Museum. This year he earned a Career Enhancement Fellowship and Camargo Foundation Fellowship. He is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Vassar College.
Speaker Bio
Andrew Clarke is a PhD candidate at Maynooth University, and an awardee of the Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship. His thesis is on hybridity and ambiguity in the writing and photography of Teju Cole. His wider research interests include postcolonial literature, anti-racism, documentary photography, and the intersections of human rights and literature. He holds an MA in Literatures of Engagement from Maynooth University. He lives in Dublin, Ireland.
Speaker Bio
Aqua Kaiyun Zheng is a practice-based PhD candidate in Literary Studies at the English Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, exploring the intersections of poetry and photography. Her research develops “photopoetry as method”, combining creative writing, documentary photography, intermedial studies, and ethnographic approaches to unearth the unfelt everyday life through ecological and feminist lenses.
Papers
Speaker Bio
C.R. Grimmer (they/them) is the author of The Lyme Letters: Poems (Winner of the Walt McDonald First Book Award), O–(ezekiel's wife), and the peer-reviewed, OEA, multimedia book Poets as Public Scholars: Activist Poets in an Age of Social Media (forthcoming: University of Michigan Press). Their poems, installations, and essays appear in venues such as the Seattle Convention Center, Poetry Magazine, and The Comparatist.They are an Assistant Professor of Poetry at Utah State University.
Speaker Bio
Daniella Sanader is a writer and reader who lives in Toronto. She is a PhD Candidate in Art History and Visual Culture at York University, where her dissertation research on artists’ writing and experimental criticism is supported by a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship and a York University Provost Dissertation Award. Beyond the university, she has been writing alongside artists’ practices for over ten years. desanader.com
Speaker Bio
Jay Ritchie is a poet, critic, and teacher. He holds a PhD in English from McGill University, where his doctoral work developed the terms critical intermedia and socially engaged poetics to describe poetry that influences the relationships between author, art, and audience in pursuit of social change. He is a Contract Faculty Member at Bishop’s University, and creative and critical work has appeared in Chicago Review, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, SAND, and elsewhere.