Notre communication vise interroger l'écriture dans son rapport à l'image dans une perspective comparatiste, dans le croisement de la littérature, l'histoire de l'écriture, l'histoire de l'art, la philosophie, à partir de l'examen de l'oeuvre d'écrivains modernes et contemporains. La base de notre argument est que l'image est le soubassement médial (Moser, 2006) privilégié de l'écriture. L'écriture fait remonter à la surface ce soubassement qui demeure souvent invisible, transparent à un premier regard, nous rappelant également que, dans le processus ontologique d'invention de l'écriture, l'image a joué un rôle de premier ordre ("l'écriture est née de l'image", nous rappelle Christin, 1995/2001). Ancrée sur différents supports, l'image survit donc dans l'écriture, soit comme fait de mémoire, soit dans sa matérialité même, en tant que fait graphique et visuel. Ce sont les traces de cette survivance matérielle du visible (Didi-Huberman, 2018) que nous comptons interroger, à partir d'exemples puisés dans les jeux typographiques, dans le collage ou montage des textes, dans les écritures "inventées", où la technique rejoint la techné dans l'invention de nouvelles formes, en élargissant par conséquent les supports, du papier à l'écran. Dans ce sens, nous allons examiner certains exemples de relation texte/image pratiqués dans la poésie et dans la prose (Mallarmé, Augusto de Campos, Michel Butor, Georges Perec, Le Clézio), mais accessoirement dans les arts (Masson, Dermisache).

“Otherness” is a strangeness beyond human experience. In architectural texts and images, it searches for interpreting similarities and differences in its (in)tangible elements that lead to unity-diversity. While the recognizable elements provide meaningful senses of symbolic richness, the alien becomes “otherness.” Their juxtaposition delivers the unexpected, contradicting its intentions and engaging in a dialogical tension between them.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the voice of the Cistercian Order, opposed mythical creatures in Romanesque capitals with suspicion. In his “Apologia” to Abbot William of St. Thierry (1124), he attacked the Cluniac. “But in the cloister…what profit is there in those ridiculous monsters, in the marvelous and deformed comeliness, that comely deformity?…we are more tempted to read in the marble than in our books, and to spend the whole day wondering at these things rather than in meditating on the law of God.”

Questions arise: Did the Church allow monks to use the perception and interpretation of architectural texts and images in worshipping God? Gestalt principles reinforce the notion that the world is built into perception. With Augustine’s sign theory, the spectator’s perceptive experience, interpretation, and contemplation should be flexible in the daily work of God.

Architecture provides a sacred space of the primaeval site in togetherness beyond time and space. When (in)tangibility is put together in diversity-unity, they deliver unforeseen characteristics to reveal variations and recognition of differences and questions in the works. It is a semiotic process between traditions and new arrivals in perception. Empathetic and flexible interpretations can identify “otherness.”

Tintern Abbey was built in 1131 adjacent to Tintern village in Monmouthshire, on the Welsh bank of the River Wye. It was the first Cistercian foundation in Wales. The abbey fell into ruin (16C), and its remains are a mixture of building works (1131–1536). Tintern has a decorated Gothic style. It ended monastic life under Henry VIII; its surroundings became industrial wireworks (1568). Tintern ruins became a visiting spot (mid-18C) in the romantic, picturesque Wye Valley.

Tintern calls Cistercian followers collective memories and curious tourists. It does not replace the tangible loss of the ruins but is traced in “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour,” written by the Romantic poet Wordsworth (13 July 1798).

The term “wilderness” in the Old Testament describes various social-ecological contexts from an uncultivated area to an abandoned ruin. The wilderness transformed into a hostile environment of danger, devils, and chaos. Being the liminal location, the desert desolation was not intended to be a site of punishment; rather, it was a place of encounter with God. Moreover, the “sublime” was not joyous. Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1798) depicts his experience of the terrifying feeling of being in the divine, surrounded by crags and waterfalls in the Alps.

It wonders: Wordsworth’s reflection on the glorious Cistercian Order that invoked the Second Crusade (1146–1149). This paper interprets the text (Wordsworth) and images (Tintern) through subjective-objective attitudes: how they support each other to transcend into wildness-sublime.

This presentation clarifies the reality of literary-cultural crossing borders by Japanese WWII repatriate-writers through the case studies of Gotō Meisei (1932–1999) and Itsuki Hiroyuki (1932–) analyzing their novels and essays. Gotō and Itsuki are famous Japanese monolingual writers that were awarded many literary prizes. They are also in the same age, which were repatriated from the Northern part of Korean peninsula and grew up in Fukuoka prefecture, the Southwest part in Japan after WWII. Moreover, they were deeply interested in Russian literature, entered the Department of Russian literature at Waseda University (Gotō enrolled in the evening course, on the other hand, Itsuki entered the daytime course, however, left the university for financial reasons), and described Russia and the former Soviet Union in their novels and essays. The previous research on Gotō and Itsuki (most of them are included in Japanese literature studies, not in the studies on comparative literature) have only focused on their repatriation from Korea from the point of view of the Japano-Korean relationship, though have overlooked that the northern part of the colonized Korea by Imperial Japan was also an important place to encounter the former Soviet Union for them because of the invasion and occupation by the Soviet troops right after WWII. It could be considered that this fact influenced their literary careers that we mentioned above. It is important to take “the hidden crossing borders” to former Soviet Union and Russia into consideration to examine the literary works of Japanese WWII repatriate writers.