A l’occasion de l'analyse de la question des capacités de l’image immobile isolée de « raconter une histoire », l’auteur développe les bases d’une narratologie fondamentale renouvelée, revisite la sémiotique du texte et les théories de l’image et réalise un déplacement méthodologique qui remplace l’approche sémiotique de la question du récit et de la narrativité par une approche en termes d’effets et de réception. La réflexion croise plusieurs disciplines : l’histoire de l’art, la narratologie, la sémiotique, mais aussi la philosophie et l’esthétique. Si l'auteur se propose bien de reconstruire les fondements même de la théorie de la narration visuelle, il ne cherche pas cependant à remplacer les théories existantes par un nouveau paradigme construit ex nihilo. Les bases nouvelles émergent au fil d’un travail sur les théories développées à ce jour ainsi qu'un corpus divers d'images narratives. Les théories critiquées se voient intégrées plutôt que niées dans le déplacement opéré. Pour résoudre le principal problème pour le récit iconique, celui du temps, l'auteur propose une nouvelle conceptualisation de la structure temporelle de l'image fixe unique. Celle-ci prend en compte le temps représenté et la durée perceptive. La dernière partie de l'ouvrage est consacrée à une relecture du Laocoon (1766) de G. E. Lessing, ouvrage largement responsable de la conception actuelle selon laquelle le récit iconique serait impossible. L'auteur montre que le débat autour des thèses de Lessing a été faussé par une confusion entre la question des possibilités/impossibilités de l’image comme telle et celle des « fins propres » de l’image dès lors qu’elle est artistique. / Based on his analysis of the possibility of iconic narrative – « telling a story » with a single still picture – Klaus-Peter Speidel develops a new foundation for visual narratology based on cognitive theory and reception aesthetics. Speidel's work is at the intersection of various disciplines : art history, literary theory, semiotics, philosophy of art and picture theory. While the thesis aims at reconstructing the foundations of a theory of visual narrative, the author does not try to replace the existing approaches with a new theory created ex nihilo. The new foundations emerge from his analysis of existing theories as well as a diverse array of pictures which play an important role in the argument. Classical theories of narrative are absorbed rather than rejected. In order to solve the main problem for visual narrative, the problem of time, the author offers a new conceptualisation of the temporal structure of still images. His taxonomy takes into account both the chronology of the story being told and perception time. The final part of the work offers a reinterpretation of G. E. Lessing's Laocoon (1766) a work that has played a major role for modern scepticism concerning the possibility of telling a story with a picture. The author shows that the discussion around Lessing has been biased by a confusion between the possibilities of the picture as such and the aims of artistic pictures. According to Speidel, Lessing's theory has lost much of its value as a theory of art but is still valuable as a theory for certain kinds of pictures, namely pictures that aim at “transparency”.

The pictorial elements of the first six books of the Aeneid can be evidenced through an examination of its structural components. With commentaries on such literary devices as parallels and antipodes, interwoven themes, cyclic patterns, and strategic placement of words in the text, three genres of painting are treated individually in Chapter 1 to illustrate the poet's consistency of design and to prove him a craftsman of the visual arts. In the first division, "Cinematic progression," attention is directed to the language which conveys movement and frequentative action, with special emphasis placed on specific passages whose verbal components possess sculptural or third-dimensional traits and contribute to the "spiral" and "circle" motifs, the appropriate visual agents for animation. Depiction of mythological subjects comprises the second division entitled "Cameos and snapshots." Three selections, dubbed monstra, are explicated with such cross references as to illustrate the poet's use of epithets which he distributes passim to elicit verbal echoes of other passages. The final division, "The Vergilian landscape," addresses two major themes, antithetical in nature, the martial and the pastoral. Their sequential juxtaposition in the text renders a marked contrast in mood which is manifested pictorially in the transition from darkness to light. A panoramic chiaroscuro emerges which is the tapestry against which Aeneas makes his sojourn through the Underworld. It is the perfect backdrop to accompany the overriding theme of "things hidden," res latentes, which encompasses a greater part of the epic and becomes the culminant motif of the paintings which comprise the visual presentation. Chapter 2 functions as a catalogue raisonne for art inspired by the Aeneid from early antiquity up to the present day. Such examples of artistic expression provide a continuum with which to appropriate Horace's maxim, ut pictura poesis, in their evaluation. The verbal exegeses in Chapter 1 have been programmed to comport with the thematic content of the visual presentation in Chapter 3, a critique exemplifying the transposition of the verbal to the pictorial. With these canvases I have attempted to render a new perspective of Vergil's epic in the genre of abstract expressionism. / Art / D. Litt. et Phil.

My thesis explores the potential and the peril of Romantic literature's increasingly complex forms through a close comparative study of the works of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey. These writers exemplify the Romantic predicament of how to make vision manifest – how to communicate one's imaginative and intellectual expansiveness without diminishing it. They sought different strategies for increasing the capacity of literary form, ostensibly in the hope of communicating more: clarifying meaning, increasing accessibility and intensifying original experience. But textual expansion – materially, stylistically and intellectually – often threatens more opportunities for confused and partial meanings to proliferate, overwhelming the reader by dividing texts and undermining attempts at coherent thought. Expansion thus becomes excess, with all its worrying associations of superfluity. To further complicate matters, Burke's influential tenet of the Sublime makes a virtue out of excess and obscurity, raising the problematic spectre of deliberately confused/confusing texts that embody an aesthetic of incomprehension. I explore these paradoxes through four types of 'textual excess' demonstrated by the writers under discussion: firstly, the tension between poetry and prose adjuncts, such as prefaces and notes, in Wordsworth and Coleridge; secondly, De Quincey's indulgent verbosity and struggle to control the freeing shapelessness of prose; thirdly, Wordsworth's and De Quincey's parallel experiences of revision as both uncontrollably diffusive and statically concentrated; and lastly, Blake's more deliberate, systematic attempt to enact a literary Sublime in which the reader is forced out of passivity by the competing demands of verbal and visual media. All are motivated and thwarted in varying degrees by their anxious preoccupation with saying "Enough", and the difficulty of determining when this becomes “Too much”. These authorial dilemmas also incorporate larger concerns with man's (over)ambition at a time of rapid and unprecedented economic, social and intellectual acceleration from the Enlightenment to industrialism. The fear that the concept and process of 'progress', or 'improvement', marks deficiency rather than fulfilment haunts Romantic writers.

The pictorial elements of the first six books of the Aeneid can be evidenced through an examination of its structural components. With commentaries on such literary devices as parallels and antipodes, interwoven themes, cyclic patterns, and strategic placement of words in the text, three genres of painting are treated individually in Chapter 1 to illustrate the poet's consistency of design and to prove him a craftsman of the visual arts. In the first division, "Cinematic progression," attention is directed to the language which conveys movement and frequentative action, with special emphasis placed on specific passages whose verbal components possess sculptural or third-dimensional traits and contribute to the "spiral" and "circle" motifs, the appropriate visual agents for animation. Depiction of mythological subjects comprises the second division entitled "Cameos and snapshots." Three selections, dubbed monstra, are explicated with such cross references as to illustrate the poet's use of epithets which he distributes passim to elicit verbal echoes of other passages. The final division, "The Vergilian landscape," addresses two major themes, antithetical in nature, the martial and the pastoral. Their sequential juxtaposition in the text renders a marked contrast in mood which is manifested pictorially in the transition from darkness to light. A panoramic chiaroscuro emerges which is the tapestry against which Aeneas makes his sojourn through the Underworld. It is the perfect backdrop to accompany the overriding theme of "things hidden," res latentes, which encompasses a greater part of the epic and becomes the culminant motif of the paintings which comprise the visual presentation. Chapter 2 functions as a catalogue raisonne for art inspired by the Aeneid from early antiquity up to the present day. Such examples of artistic expression provide a continuum with which to appropriate Horace's maxim, ut pictura poesis, in their evaluation. The verbal exegeses in Chapter 1 have been programmed to comport with the thematic content of the visual presentation in Chapter 3, a critique exemplifying the transposition of the verbal to the pictorial. With these canvases I have attempted to render a new perspective of Vergil's epic in the genre of abstract expressionism. / Art / D. Litt. et Phil.