JOE BRAY, ALISON GIBBONS AND BRIAN McHALE

contemporary multimodal literature, that is, literary texts that feature a multitude of
semiotic modes in the communication and progression of their narratives. She claims
that the advent of digital technologies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries has produced an upsurge of literary works which emphasize their own form
through visual and material experimentation. In her essay, Gibbons suggests a for-
mal taxonomy for contemporary multimodal literature: illustrated works, multimodal
(re)visions, tactile fictions, altered books and collage fictions, concrete/typographical
fictions, and ontological hoax.
Although graphic novels are certainly multimodal, Gibbons chooses not to discuss
them, preferring instead to view such works as a genre in their own right. In her chapter
on graphic narrative, Hilary Chute considers the relationship of comics to literary exper-
imentation. Chute rebuffs the charge that comics are merely popular and low culture
artefacts, proposing that they are experimental by way of having vigorously expanded
the rubric of literature over the past thirty years. More pertinently, comics are experi-
mental in the sense that they self-consciously draw attention to their own construction
and obstruct normal reading practices. In support of her argument, Chute invites readers
on a tour of experimental comic practice starting in the early twentieth century, con-
tinuing into the late twentieth century and concluding with the comics of today. Ulti-
mately for Chute, comics, like multimodal literature and concrete poetics, explore the
spaces in between word and image and offer a rich and relevant visual-verbal syntax.
While literature has incorporated the visual in experimental practices, art has
assimilated the verbal. Reflecting on the presence of words in recent visual art, Jes-
sica Prinz claims that in the twentieth century we witnessed an eruption of language
into the field of the visual arts, an eruption prefigured and stimulated by avant-garde
experiments such as Dada and Futurism. A key figure in the historical lineage of words
in visual art, Prinz claims, was the avant-gardist Marcel Duchamp, who influenced
an entire generation of artists in the latter twentieth century for whom art was not
only visual but also linguistic. Moreover, the twenty-first century exhibits a further
enhancement of the integration of word and image, with works of language art that
are inspired by, offer tribute to, or appropriate literary texts. Consequently, Prinz inti-
mates, the boundaries between art and literature are blurring and dissipating. The
literary and the artistic are no longer necessarily distinct types of aesthetic artefact.

Experiments across media

From the beginning of the twentieth century right down to the present, experimental
literature has had to find ways to coexist with other, competing media visual art,
music in a range of genres, performance, photography, film, television, digital media
competitors that have expanded in number, power, appeal and market-share over
the course of the century. A common thread uniting several of the chapters in this
volume is experimentation with these other, adjacent media. In some cases this exper-
imentation has taken the form of collaboration across media, or even co-optation of
one medium by another; in other cases, it has been more akin to baiting a threatening

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