Paper short abstract:

This paper explores literary texts on paintings, firstly, in novels such as The Blue Guitar by John Banville, secondly, poems and stories written in response to paintings at the exhibition “Lines of Vision: Irish Writers on Art” in Dublin understood through their internal and external narratives.

Paper long abstract:

The relationship between image and text is an area many have commented on in passing, but rarely in greater detail. In anthropology, there has been a debate over image versus text. Visual anthropologists argue that images have a capacity to present circumstances that cannot be captured in words, while others have expressed the conventional view that text is the superior of the two forms as it can operate on a theoretical level. But with the extraordinary expansion of images in social life that has produced new analytical awareness, this latter view is increasingly contested: images are both composed and contextualized in line with theoretical perspectives, and they can generate new ones. Sometimes an image needs a text in order to be understood. It is also the case, as John Berger argues in his poetic pamphlet that there are different Ways of Seeing. The photographer, the painter, the spectator - they all watch the same picture in different ways. So do writers. With ethnography from the world of contemporary writers and their work in Ireland, this paper explores literary texts on paintings, firstly, in novels such as The Blue Guitar by John Banville which features a painter and, secondly, poems and stories written in response to paintings at the exhibition "Lines of Vision: Irish Writers on Art" in Dublin´s National Gallery of Ireland in 2015. Marcus Banks´ concepts "internal narrative" and "external narrative" will be used to explain the relationships between these images and texts.