[Nummer 2]
The big mix
Vooys / Woord / Blik / Beeld
Interdisciplinarity is a magic word for contemporary academia; Boundaries must be crossed and academic fields renewed. In their respective histories, Vooys, magazine for literature and Blik, magazine for audiovisual culture have never given much credence to strict borders: both the literary and the audiovisual worlds are given a broad interpretation.
Hence, the double issue in your hands, born of a collaboration between the two magazines, was not cooked up to be fashionable, but emerged from the wish to continually explore and enquire our ‘own’ domains. The field of literature can not be seen as separate from ‘the visual’, as Ernst van Alphen's contribution shows. Conversely, studies of visual culture have been mindful of ‘the word’ ever since the linguistic turn, as Lizzy van Winsen's article makes clear. The awareness that the two fields are not separate entities but have all kinds of - often unexpected - interfaces is what brought the two editorial staffs together.
Whereas Vooys and Blik are convinced of the co-dependence of our two fields and of the necessity to make connections, this will perhaps not be self-evident to all our readers. Therefore an important objective of this issue is to give readers of Vooys and Blik a taste of ‘the other’ field. To broaden our readers' horizons more than usual we have incorporated a diverse range of subjects. Vooys-subscribers will be as surprised by Joost Broeren's article on abusive subtitling as Blik-subscribers will be by Feike Dietz's guide to early-modern emblems.
The combination of word and image has encouraged our authors to write inspiring and surprising contributions. For instance, Jan Baetens argues that photographs - seen as the most static of media - can contain a great deal of narrativity. Roos Brekelemans writes about the novelisation: turning films into books. Furthermore, there is plenty of attention paid to the literary word/image-genre par excellence: the comicbook and graphic novel. National comic-connoisseur Joost Pollmann deals with (feminine) autobiographism in comicbooks, while Ingrid van Osch investigates traumatic memory in Art Spiegelman's graphic novels. As you have come to expect from us, we also offer interviews with, and personal confessions by, eminent names from the world of words and images.
The interplay of words and images is perhaps most clearly captured in the illustrations that accompany our various articles and the design of the magazine. Thus, we hope to translate our love for the rich borderland of literature and visual culture for you when reading, and looking at, this issue.
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