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.