VOLUME 10 | ISSUE 1 | 2025 | Experimental Literature and Intermedial Relations
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Hannah Van Hove and Tessel Veneboer, "Introduction: Experimental Literature and Intermedial Relations"
Stephen Forbes, "'Cubistic Time' and Phenomenology in William Demby’s The Catacombs"
This article explores the theory of “cubistic time” in William Demby’s The Catacombs (1965), arguing that Demby uses Cubism and existential phenomenology to show how simultaneous perspectives are presented in the novel, and how these ostensibly disparate viewpoints are arranged in “collage” form as part of a coherent whole. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological theories, it illustrates how this fusion of modern art theory and philosophy comes together and functions in Demby’s novel. The use of metanarrative and apparently real newspaper reports in the novel creates a “jigsaw puzzle” effect in which the reader has to piece together the different fragments of information, which can be interpreted through theories found in phenomenology and Cubism itself. While none of the scarce criticism on Demby’s novel to date explicitly mentions metanarrative or phenomenology, this article argues that there is clear evidence of both. Drawing on work by Mikhail Bakhtin and Peter Bürger, this article further shows how narratological and modern art theories, which are linked to ideas found in phenomenology, are present in Demby’s work. In The Catacombs, clear parallels can be determined between what Demby describes as “Cubistic time,” phenomenology, and metanarrative through his use of different perspectives and fractured, non-linear time. Overall, this article sheds light on the intricate and sophisticated narrative technique used in The Catacombs and fully explores what Demby means by “Cubistic time.”
Keywords: cubism, phenomenology, time, simultaneity, metanarrative
Joule Zheng Wang, "'In these Moments I Hate Language': David Wojnarowicz’s Typewriter and Tape Recorder.” Experimental Literature and Intermedial Relations"
David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992) was a multimedia artist, a writer, and an activist. This paper examines how Wojnarowicz navigates the tension between the limitations of language and its use as a medium for articulating his queer life and death through his typewriter and tape recorder. While Wojnarowicz detests language as part of the structural oppression in the US, he relies on language and writing as an expressive outlet and a political tool against the oppressive system. Focusing on Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (1991) and Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz (2018), this paper explores his thinking and experimental writing practices. Combining both Lacanian psychoanalysis and German media theory as a bridge between the symbolic and the material, it interprets how Wojnarowicz transforms his senses and body from the unconscious mind to the concrete political reality through the operation of media technologies.
Keywords: David Wojnarowicz, typewriter, tape recorder, German media theory, language and writing
Eline Cremers, "Reading the Body as the Site of Dreams/Dreaming/ Dreamers in Kathy Acker’s Work"
The work of Kathy Acker frequently focuses on female subjects who are constrained by the limitations imposed on their bodies by the phallogocentric structures of society and narrative. Engaging with a statement Acker makes in her essay “Seeing Gender” (1995), “[w]hen I dream, my body is the site, not only of the dream, but also of the dreaming and of the dreamer” (Bodies of Work 166), this article suggests that dreams in Acker’s fiction reveal more fluid ways of understanding the body, and that various motifs, metaphors and narrative techniques – all related to dreams – defy confining bodily boundaries. To indicate the evolution of the relationship between dreams and the body in Acker’s oeuvre and shed light on the role of dreams in shaping her narratives, three texts from before, during and after her turn to mythmaking are discussed. First, the way in which dreams, abortions and death influence the boundaries of the bodily site in Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream (1986) is examined. Then, the article explains how the dreamlike figure of the sailor in Empire of the Senseless (1988) reflects an understanding of the body as, in Judith Butler’s words, “a process of materialization” (Bodies That Matter 9; emphasis in original), while the novel’s storyworld blurs the distinction between dream and reality. Additionally, considering the motif of tattooing in relation to Elizabeth Grosz’s Volatile Bodies (1994) illustrates how dreams not only shape the site of the body, but are also shaped by it. Finally, in My Mother: Demonology (1993), dreams can be extracted from the site of the possessed body in the form of language through an exorgasm, which can be linked to Julia Kristeva’s definition of the abject and McKenzie Wark’s discussion of the penetrable body. These readings of the body as the site of dreams/dreaming/dreamers demonstrate that Acker’s novels problematize the Cartesian separation of mind and body and contribute to a queer perception of the body.
Keywords: Kathy Acker, dreams, embodiment, Judith Butler, McKenzie Wark
Kerry-Jane Wallart, "Cross-cultural Drama, Tragic Anomalies, and Queered Spaces: The Case of Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (1995)"
Mostly received as a New World, rebellious re-writing of the Greek myth of Medea, or as a queer and feminist intervention against machismo, Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman actually revisits tragedy with ambiguous codes. Never explicit, the orders and disorders of the play structure plotlines, characterisation, and settings which are difficult to interpret in any single direction. This article argues that the cross-cultural dimension of the second generation of Chicana writers provokes “anomalies”, or resistance to any norms: a theatrical experimentation which collapses all previous discourses, however emancipatory they might be, and pushes towards the emergence of collective knowledge through performative experience.
Keywords: cross-cultural drama, Chicana literature, Cherríe Moraga, Medea, re-writing
Ege A. Özbek, "The Politics and Poetics of Intermedial Sentimentality in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014)"
This paper examines Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) through the intersecting frameworks of intermediality, genre theory, and sentimentality to explore how the text enacts a poetics of resistance against systemic anti-Black racism. Rankine’s hybrid work mobilizes a lyric essay form that brings together poetry, prose, documentary materials, and visual art, producing what the paper terms intermedial sentimentality—a mode of affective communication in which textual and visual forms collaborate to render the lived experience of racialized embodiment both affectively immediate and politically legible. Synthesizing Irina Rajewsky’s concept of the media border as an “enabling structure[s]” (“Border Talks” 66) with Lauren Berlant’s theorization of the sentimental and the “impasse[s]” (Cruel Optimism 199), the analysis demonstrates how intermedial sentimentality transforms private registers of racial injury into collective modes of critique and witnessing. The sentimental—often dismissed as excessive or manipulative—is reconfigured here as a relational and communicative code that fosters identification, discomfort, and critical reflection. By invoking shared cultural scripts of grief and trauma, Citizen constructs a sentimental space of resistance that reveals affect as inherently political. Citizen resists the spectacle of Black suffering while calling attention to its invisibility. It disrupts simple empathy, creating instead an impasse that implicates the reader in a difficult mode of witnessing by withholding the visual spectacle of Black suffering while textually invoking its somatic reality. In doing so, it forges what Zizi Papacharissi terms “affective publics,” linking private experience to collective critique. The paper concludes that Rankine’s intermedial sentimentality expands the possibilities of genre and political feeling, positioning Citizen as a powerful intervention in both contemporary literature and racial discourse.
Keywords: intermedial sentimentality, sentimentality, lyric essay, hybridity, resistance
Hannah Van Hove, "On the Act and Forms of Writing Grief: Paul Stephenson in Conversation about Hard Drive"
Paul Stephenson is a poet, teacher and researcher whose debut collection Hard Drive (2023) was shortlisted for the Polari Book Prize 2024 and the Lambda Literary Award 2024. In this collection, Stephenson considers the impact of his partner's sudden death through affectionate, humorous and formally adventurous poems. In this conversation, Stephenson shares his thoughts on the experimental strategies used in his poetry, reflecting on the act and forms of writing grief. The interview took place on 18 November 2024 during an English Literature class at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Hannah Van Hove introduced the author to the students in the audience and prepared and asked the questions. Students were invited to ask questions at the end of the interview. Xavier Houtave subsequently transcribed the interview, which was later edited by Hannah Van Hove.
Keywords: Paul Stephenson, Hard Drive, grief, writing process, experimental writing
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Carmijn Gerritsen and Elisabeth Bekers, "On Remembering the Voices of Grenfell: Diana Evans in Conversation About Writing as a Political Tool and A House for Alice"
Diana Evans is a Black British writer of British-Nigerian descent. She is the critically acclaimed author of four novels and a recent collection of non-fiction pieces. Her latest novel, A House for Alice (2023), interweaves the personal with the socio-political and addresses issues of intergenerational belonging and collective remembrance in the wake of the Grenfell Tower tragedy of 14 June 2017 in West London. In this conversation, Evans shares her thoughts on the role of literature as a political tool for socio-cultural representation and discusses the genesis of A House for Alice. The interview took place on 13 May 2025 and was conducted, transcribed and edited by Carmijn Gerritsen (graduate of the Research MA in Literary Studies at Radboud University in Nijmegen and affiliated researcher at the Centre for Literary and Intermedial Crossings at Vrije Universiteit Brussel) with the help of Prof. dr. Elisabeth Bekers (Professor of British and Postcolonial Literature at VUB and editor-in-chief of the Black British Women Writers website).
Keywords: contemporary Black British literature, Diana Evans, A House for Alice, Grenfell Tower fire, cultural remembrance
