WHEN ANALYTICAL CATEGORIES CROSS MEDIA: DIFFERENTIAL TRANSMEDIAL RECONFIGURATION IN EDGAR ALLAN POE, ODILON REDON, ZDZISŁAW BEKSIŃSKI, AND FRANCIS BACON
WHEN ANALYTICAL CATEGORIES CROSS MEDIA: DIFFERENTIAL TRANSMEDIAL RECONFIGURATION IN EDGAR ALLAN POE, ODILON REDON, ZDZISŁAW BEKSIŃSKI, AND FRANCIS BACON

Summary/Abstract: Literary–visual comparison often relies on categories whose apparent continuity obscures shifts in the evidence that sustains them. This article asks how an analytical category changes when it moves from verbal narrative into visual art. Drawing on Mieke Bal’s concept-based account of interdisciplinarity and intermedial theories of medium specificity, it proposes differential transmedial reconfiguration as a four-part method: operational continuity, medium-specific realisation, differential effect, and resistant remainder. The method identifies the problem a category retains, the formal indices through which another medium recasts it, the interpretive gain produced by that recasting, and the point beyond which transfer becomes distortion. Three asymmetrical pairings test the argument: gaze in Edgar Allan Poe’s Ligeia and Odilon Redon’s The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity; body in Berenice and Francis Bacon’s Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X; and collapse in Morella and Zdzisław Beksiński’s AA78. Close reading and close visual analysis show that gaze moves from recursive narrated perception to disembodied pictorial reciprocity; body from synecdochic isolation to painterly deformation; and collapse from failed symbolic differentiation to unstable spatial organisation. Comparison becomes defensible when continuity is demonstrated through medium-specific evidence and the limits of transfer remain explicit.

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