Ideal identities and impossible translations: drawing on writing and writing on drawing
- Submitting institution
-
York St John University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 486
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
-
10.1007/978-3-030-21774-7
- Book title
- Imaging identity: text, mediality and contemporary visual culture
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan
- ISBN
- 9783030217730
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- December
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
-
http://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/3653/
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The relations between pictures and writing, as explored in word-and-image studies or semiotic scholarship, are commonly characterised through recourse to notions of translatability. ‘Ideal identities and impossible translations’ positions the image at the heart of any translatory effort between pictures and the written word. Recognising images as possessing multiple and irreducible identities that are born out differently in writing and pictures, the book chapter explores how and why translation, as both the failure and success of relating parts of a separation, functions as a practice and analogy.
Part of an anthology, Imaging Identity, that seeks to investigate the constitution of personal, national and cultural identity through verbal and visual media, the chapter shows the utility of a detailed and rigorous theoretical analysis for urgent questions relating to identity politics. Theoretical distinctions established in semiotic scholarship (and negotiated through the practices of translation) are shown to be premised on an understanding of identity—much like that of many nation states—that is static, univocal and linear, and thus incompatible with the media and materials they seek to determine.
The book chapter is part of the author’s larger research endeavour in word-and-image studies that challenges categorical distinctions between the verbal and the picture. Whilst the present chapter is a rigorous critique of semiotic assumptions, it promotes the inevitable conjunction of theoretical and material discourses in current image theory. The author has explored the repercussions of this argument, for instance, the notion of ideality—in short: the conceptualisation of a thing, which necessarily cannot encapsulate the thing—elsewhere on the specific material example of paper. While the translatory vacillation (between pictural and verbal sign) has been explicitly addressed in a journal article about graphic form.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
