The visual imagery of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace might have as one of its sources the “graceful”, hence popular, art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Grace’s beauty veils her emotional torment in the mode similar to the comely faces of Pre-Raphaelite models: theirs are the faces disguising suffering and insanity. Moreover, during her confinement in the asylum Grace is even compared by one of the characters to the raging Ophelia, a theme recurrent in the Victorian art. In her “psychoanalytic” sessions the servant reveals her obsession with the gothic image of her dead mother drowning in the sea, metamorphosing into another woman, perhaps Mary Whitney or Nancy Montgomery. In the dream vision of doctor Simon Jordan in turn, Grace overcomes the Ophelia-like death in water and lives on despite the difficult past. Consequently, Pre-Raphaelite paintings constitute another Victorian element in the novel’s dense texture, which has already been interpreted by the critics as the one involving Dickensian orphans and Coventry Patmore’s “angels in the house”.

Key words: Pre-Raphaelite visual arts, victorian sensation novel, symbolic corruption of female body, representing Ophelia, rewriting Victorianism.

The present article focuses on the visual poetry of the Mexican poet José Juan Tablada who is one of the most important precursors of the avant-garde in the twentieth century. As numerous critics have remarked, José Juan Tablada made several major contributions to modern poetry in Mexico. Although Tablada is generally credited with having introduced Latin American poets to the Japanese haiku, he was also responsible for encouraging them to experiment with visual poetry. As a result of a visit to Japan in 1900, José Juan Tablada became interested in haiku tradition and in Japanese ideograms which inspirited him to create his own poetry in the style of oriental work but adopted to the Latin American perspective of his imagination and to the rules of the Spanish language. It appears that Tablada´s attention was focused mainly on the experiments of the modern French Imagist poets and was influenced by Apollinaire´s Calligrammes, a problem that we partially intend to explain in the present article spotlighting some occurrences, but finally we conclude that both poets must have been inspired by the previous form of visual poetry, known to the ancient Greeks as technopaigneia and to the Romans as carmina figurata, or by the pre-Hispanic ideographic forms; in this subject we consider a long list of possible inspirations. The principal idea of this paper is to analyse the visual poetry of Tablada from the perspective of its interdisciplinary character, where images and words situate his poems in a spatial configuration. Therefore we have concentrated our attention on two books of poems published in Caracas, the first one entitled Un día… Poemas sintéticos edited in 1919, and the second one, Li-Po y otros poemas, published in 1920, as an example of the so called visual poetry or ideographic poems, a denomination more appropriate for the second collection. To sum up, Tablada was an innovator, though he did borrow ideas like most writers do. His haikus are original, accompanied with his self-made drawings, and have a distinct Mexican flavor containing local references to flora, fauna o Mexican culture — characteristics that we underline in this paper while also providing a general overview of some theoretical aspects related to Literature and Art.

Key words: Visual poetry, ideographic poems, haiku, José Juan Tablada, Mexican poetry.

The artists and the theorists have always been fascinated by and driven to discover the relationship between arts, like painting and literature. What may come out as a surpise for those who love books, as for those who admire painting, is the illustrated theory of literature by Roger Caillois, whose background is not in literature or in painting, but in sociology. His work entitled Au coeur du fantastique published by Gallimard in 1965 and illustrated with famous paintings as well as less known ones has brought together literary criticism and painting by focusing on the theory of the genre of fantastique in literature and in painting, pointing at the similarities rather than differences.
However from the 18th century, literature has beeen considered to have straight connection with time, what means being subject to chronosyntaxe (time syntax) while painting has been linked to space what signifies being subject to toposyntaxe (space syntax). The Caillois’s theory allows the public to guess what lies in the profoundity of fantastique, intangible but identified in art.

Key words: Fantastique, literature, painting, Roger Caillois.

Tracing the origins of cinematic devices of literature in the so call perceptual revolution of 1905—1915 by Donald M. Lowe, as well as in Avant Garde movements, the author of this article explores film making techniques in the work of some contemporary Spanish American novelists. Along with stream of consciousness technique and its cinematic devices examined by Robert Humphrey, the author highlights semantic, syntactic or pragmatic montage as the basic technique for cinematic effects in literature.

Key words: Spanish American novelists, cinematic effects, montage.

The general aim of this article is to discuss ways in which an acclaimed Canadian writer, Carol Shields, employs, and simultaneously subverts, photographic metaphors in her short story titled “Scenes.” Shields skillfully arranges a series of scenes from Frances’s — the protagonist’s — past into a concise biography. Owing to their affinity to photographs, the scenes from Frances’s life might be attributed the status of objective and honest representations of reality which function as truthful evidence of what happened. Importantly, however, while Shields’s story evokes the photographic associations, it simultaneously calls in question their documentary reliability. In other words, Frances’s fragmentary biography — shown in (verbally constructed) images or flashes — undermines the concepts of both, a photograph as a documentary inscription of the truth, and language as a fitting medium of describing this truth.

Key words: Photography, representation, biography, language.