This essay begins with a close reading of Tracy’s recent programmatic formulations concerning: (1) the ‘strong fragments’ of culture that ‘shatter, fragment, negate any closed totality system’; and (2) those ‘most powerful fragments’ that ‘show themselves not as substances but as events and positively open to liminal Infinity’. If some cultural fragments are mere ‘period pieces’ without enduring truth or transformative power, and others are dangerously nostalgic, these fragments, Chase suggests, can act strongly when collaged into some ‘new form of witness against any false whole or claim to completeness’. T. S Eliot’s The Waste Land is an ambiguous example here. The pinnacle of the fragment for Tracy, however, is the ‘frag-event’ that opens towards the creative liminality of an invisible Infinity. ‘Marxist-Kabbalist’ Walter Benjamin is ‘the projective force’ behind Tracy’s forays into the fragment. The essay proposes the role of assemblage or collage for both fragmenting fragments and the Tracyean frag-event, stressing the role of edges and unexpected connections, and concluding by wondering how far Christian theology is really ready to think in such a manner of collage.

Countering popular assumptions about comics being made for and by men, this chapter begins by offering a brief alternative comics history focusing on women artists, covering comics production from the mainstream to the underground. Taking cues from recent exhibitions on women artists and comics history by women authors and artists, the chapter provides insight into the different contexts and communities, covering political cartoonists and illustrators, mainstream and underground artists.

The second half of the chapter focuses on the graphic novel and examines works by Lynda Barry and a new generation of women comics artists, Ebony Flowers and Weng Pixin. It elaborates on the possibilities of reading the graphic novels in light of the rich history of women artists and comics storytelling, building bridges between individual and collective stories while pointing out the innovations unfolding through drawing, writing, and collage.

The coda is essentially a supplementation of, rather than a conclusion to, what has gone before. It begins by considering the space of the page as a textual environment, and the ways in which its meanings are diversified by tabular layout. The argument moves on to the challenges of multi-perspectivalism and agglomerative looking as they weave a depth in our existential duration and ecological relating. Translation also triggers blind fields beyond the frame of the text by the use of collage and the cultivation of Erlebnis. The coda then addresses the nature of translational subjecthood, and ends with propositions about the real ecological reach of translation which is an integral part of its literariness.

The mode of writing with which Rushdie’s work has most often been associated is magic realism. Critics have compared his oeuvre with those of South American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez. This chapter explores Rushdie’s engagement with realism beyond South American literary traditions, re-engaging with the art-historical mode of magic realism conceived in Germany in the 1920s. Rushdie’s conceptual approach to space, place, and time is deeply rooted in a visual literacy that aligns with the mysterious paintings of magic realism, as well as drawing on the technical magic of photography and cinema. This focus enables stronger connections to be made between art, visual cultures, and Rushdie’s geopolitical realism, reinvesting criticality in the mode and discourse of literary magic realism.

Surrealist collage, favouring immediacy over sustained diegetic developments, would seem to contradict the possibility of coherent or cohesive narratives. Yet the elliptical mode of juxtaposition, which replaces in collage the (con)sequential links of conventional narratives, tantalizes the viewer-reader into searching for new links between disparate elements, recalling past stories or imagining potential scenarios. The chapter explores various key examples of surrealist collage narrative in both the verbal and visual fields: the micro-narratives suggested in André Breton’s early collage poems; Benjamin Péret’s collage poems made up of newspaper fragments; Giorgio de Chirico’s or René Magritte’s painted collages of enigmatic encounters; or Czech surrealist Jindřich Štyrský’s erotic scenarios. Focusing in particular on the parodic rewriting of the codes of melodrama in Max Ernst’s collage-novels, the chapter examines how fragments of popular nineteenth-century illustrated novels are recycled into new narratives. Finally, the study proposes a critique of psychoanalytical or alchemical interpretations, hermeneutic models that erase local disruptions in favour of a global coherence.

This chapter examines the complex physical relations that characterized a range of eighteenth-century literary, visual, and material objects that attached small fragments together into a new larger form. Arguing that these created a dynamic dialogue of part and whole, it explores how the process of joining allowed small fragments, displayed and placed together, to materialize emotional connection. It focuses on four key material forms: the production of herbaria; a series of collaged stained-glass windows at Plas Newydd, the home of the “Ladies of Llangollen,” Lady Eleanor Butler (1739–1829) and Sarah Ponsonby (1755–1831), in Llangollen, North Wales; the interior decoration and furnishings of A la Ronde, in Exmouth, Devon, home to cousins Jane and Mary Parminter (1750–1811 and 1767–1849); and the creation of eighteenth-century patchwork.

Elizabeth Bishop wrote with an awareness of developments in the visual arts at the beginning of the twentieth century, often seen as spearheading the Modernist movement in all the arts. As well as being a profoundly visual poet and sharing an interest in detailed description with her mentor Marianne Moore, Bishop also questioned the idea of a settled point of view and embraced both uncertainty and multiplicity in relation to seeing. Temperamentally she found an affinity with the idea of the Baroque in seventeenth-century writing and in the parallels with twentieth-century art drawn in art theory. Her early attraction to Surrealism also had to do with the disorientating effects of seeing and the uncertain boundary between inner and outer worlds. A writer who also painted herself, though in a small way, Bishop was always alert to issues of spatial representation, and how art and writing traced a similar process of their own emergence.

The principle and technique of collage as the juxtaposition of disparate elements is generally considered to be the fundamental model of twentieth-century avant-garde art forms. As structure rather than representation it ranges from Picasso’s cubist works to Rauschenberg’s combines; and within Surrealism, from Joan Miro’s pasted papers to George Hugnet’s “poèmes découpés.” This chapter argues that verbal and visual collage is at the heart of Surrealism’s revolutionary project, the means of contesting the established order, by imaginatively reconfiguring signs to produce new meanings – poetic, erotic, or satirical. Various questions regarding collage are explored. What are its limits? Can the concept embrace Dalí’s assemblages, film montage, Breton’s display of objects, or examples of citation, parody, or pastiche? Can it be defined as an experimental form rather than an aesthetic object, a dynamic process rather than a finished product? If collage is considered a collective activity, can it be identified with intertextuality? Finally, the chapter examines critical interpretations of collage by the surrealists themselves and explores examples of postsurrealist collage.

Photography played an increasingly significant role in surrealism in the 1920s and especially the 1930s, when the art form was becoming ever more popular across printed picture magazines and mass-media newspapers. During this time, the surrealists developed their own avant-garde uses of photography, turning it into both a surrealist art practice in its own right and as a means to represent the surrealist group and their interests. The chapter argues that the surrealists employed a diversity of photographic techniques and genres, and developed these in new ways, as demonstrated across their various activities in public forums, surrealist magazines, exhibitions and books. Since photography was situated clearly within the aims of the surrealist project, surrealist photography becomes both a reflection on and a means of constructing the images of their vision, desire, dreams and social ambitions, which were all too often at variance with the predominant social uses of photography.

Chapter 3 looks at Duras’s adaptation and serialization of an actual fait divers from the press in Les Viaducs de la Seine-et-Oise (1960), L’Amante anglaise (1967), and finally Le Théâtre de l’Amante anglaise (1968, 1991). Like a “copycat killer,” I argue that Duras copies the sensational media style of the true crime case in her three works by insisting on the power of fascination in such stories. She creates mises en abyme in the three works as her characters read and discuss newspaper reports on the crime. In so doing, the fait divers at the origin of the works becomes a sort of “found object,” circulating within the fictional world created by the author and calling attention to itself as an outside, real-world referent.

This chapter examines the representation of walking within the modern novels of New York. In American literature, walking the city seems to incarnate some coincidence between the uncertainties of discourse and the fluctuations of a place that is both circumscribed and open to the unknown. Walking the city cannot simply be considered as the pretext of a realist description nor simply associated with an abstract means of enunciation either. The act of walking reveals the manner in which writers sense and recite what may be no more than an emotion: an experience of the influx of fragments, of the grating notes and inflexions that nonetheless constitute the city. Walking the streets of New York, in American fiction, therefore simultaneously emblematizes the metatextual questioning of a discourse that is now conscious of its own limitations and the involvement of this discourse in the sensitive diversity of the world. Indeed, far from estranging the text from the world, far from alienating words into some reflexive abstraction, far from secluding discourse into some intransitive, self–sufficient construct, the consideration of the limits of language makes the very substance of the novel vibrate with endless possibilities.