Diagrams of writing. Design, ekphrastic and figural patterns in artistic and literary forms

Contemporary debates and research continue to investigate the various interrelations between the arts. “Communication”, “exchanges”, “encounters” between the arts, “interdisciplinarity”, “intermediality” are quite often cited expressions for denoting that there is a common ground of poetics and aesthetics among the different arts. On the other hand, if we focus on literary forms, formulas such as “text – image” or “word – image” seem to cover an entire spectrum of relations between the written or the dicible and the visual. The notion of “ekphrasis” adequately captures processes of transcription and transition from the visual towards the verbal. Thus, the term “ekphrastic writing” emerges as a particular form of writing with emphasis on visual phenomena and especially on visual arts, most of the cases at the level of description. If we turn to contemporary philosophy, Jacques Rancière’s thought provides critical insights for aesthetics as a particular kind of thought, the notion of “figure” as the site for semantic displacements, and his conceptual invention of the “phrase – image”, as a process of meaning continuity and disruption within an artwork. If we turn to other French philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François Lyotard, the notion of the “figural” is used in various ways, from the history of art to contemporary painting, declaring generative, transcriptional, mutation and multiplication processes of the senses. In the case of Deleuze especially, the figural is associated with the notion of the “diagram”, referring mainly to the organizational and matrixial aspects of an artistic process.  
Against this background, it would be intriguing to investigate the diagrammatic side of writing defined here either as a designing process and/or as the evidence of new ekphrastic patters on the level of the general or topical organization of a literary form. The opposite direction is also of interest, that is, how other arts are informed by diagrams of literary and writing forms. While we can trace in several novels ekphrastic modes relating to classic painting or modern art, it is a challenge to detect interactions between literary forms and contemporary art forms, practices and works. Thus, we invite papers that (a) explore the interrelations between the literary forms and the arts with an emphasis on the diagrammatic, ekphrastic and figural aspects of the writing process; (b) reconsider ekphrastic and figural writing under new paradigms, conceptual and theoretical paths, suggesting new qualities and patterns; (c) address the designing aspect as a form of a preparatory process that involves the analysis of artistic references and their respected creative processes and the subsequent import to literary constructions; (d) examine written practices from fields such as contemporary history of art; (e) focus on the spatial or architectural aspect of literary form.