From Page to Screen - WRAP: Warwick Research Archive Portal ...

towards a more expressive visual element than the conventional aesthetics of print
typography allow for and allows us to re-evaluate the relation between the textual and the
image elements in a literary text.
Even printed text is never purely transparent, never just textual, it always has a physical
side of the representation of the letters on the page, which, however, is in most cases
and in the framework oftraditional typography subordinate to the dominant textual level.
With text on screen, however, there is a possibility ofemphasising anew the physical and
visual reality ofthe text, but at the same time there is always the danger of the hierarchy
reversing, of text becoming ornament, subordinate to image.If we consider literature as
an artform concerned with TEXT, this poses serious questions for this artform.
Fiction isperhaps the most closely bound ofall the arts to the concept ofsequential time.[...}
Literature can convey the passing of time because it implies a temporal aspect. (Sharon
Spencerl"
There is a long aesthetic tradition to distinguish and oppose painting as something
spatial and immediately perceivable on the one hand and literature that has a linear and
temporal nature and has to be read. ''Literature'' here means prose texts, which, due to
their often very conventional, solid block typography, do not give much instant visual
information.
A strict opposition between reading literature on the one hand andperceiving paintings on
the other cannot be maintained. A printed page has a visual appeal, a text is seen before
it is read; similarlya painting has to be 'read' after being seen. The physical presence ofa
painting makes us believe that an immediate understanding ofthe whole is possible, but
in order to grasp the given information the eye has to move along the surface and read it.
Pictorial perception has the same temporal processing that linguistic perception has
''with the difference that the ordering of this perceptual sequence is not predetermined
by the painting itself'> . Readers usually have to follow the order the text imposes on
38 Sharon Spencer, Space TimeandStructure in the Modern Novel (New York: New York University Press,
1971)1 p.XV: . . .
39 Wendy Steiner, The Colors ofRhetoric, Problems in the Relation Between Modern Literature and Painung
(Chicago & London: University ofChicago Press, 1982), P.36.
Chapter 6 - page 221